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Re: [Asrg] Re: 6. Proposals - Pull System (revisited)

2003-12-01 10:14:39
On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 12:44:33PM +0100, Dag Kihlman wrote:
I agree with Scott: people seem unwilling to make hard choices. The SMTP
protocol is old, ideal for spammers and inefficient. Any textbook covering

Could you point out an 'innefficiency' in SMTP more specifically,
please?

That's one fault I don't see SMTP as having - unless you're saying that
all the spam clogging the pipes makes SMTP inefficient... not quite the
normal application of that word.

communication between tiers have one basic rule: avoid communication as much
as possible. The ideal solution is to send all at once and if necessary
receive a receipt containing the data you want or an error message. Any new
standard ought to be built on this simple principle. Why HELO? Send
everything and let the receiving server go through the sender's data
returning the appropriate answer.

That sounds like a contradiction to me: "avoid communication" AND "Send
everything"

Steps like HELO will continue to be useful in protocols for the same
reason the 3 way handshake is critical to TCP. Before you commit
significant resources to a session, you need to sanity check it. Failure
to do so leaves the door open to DoS attacks.

-- 
David Maxwell, david(_at_)vex(_dot_)net|david(_at_)maxwell(_dot_)net --> 
Mastery of UNIX, like
mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear,
but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live
in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. - Thomas Scoville 


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