--On Monday, 25 June, 2001 14:48 -0400 Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> wrote:
...
right, but absent prior agreement it becomes a guessing game.
it's hard enough to make mail work reliability without asking
users to guess about which priority setting will get their
mail through a particular MTA.
Keith,
It seems to me that there are two important cases here:
* The MTAs of concern are under the control of either the sender
or the receiver. In this case, the "guessing game" is no worse
than the one that is played with every message: you need to
guess what "from:" and "subject" lines, and envelope address to
use to maximize the chance that I will read your mail or, put
differently, which ones to avoid to minimize the chance that I
will delete it without reading (or have agents or filters do
that for me).
* The MTAs making the decision are "in the middle", and not
under the control of either sender or recipient, or anyone both
accept as an appropriate intervening authority. That scenario
is basically equivalent to all of the other interception objects
on the network (what you think about those is well-established;
let's not have the discussion here again), but with one major
difference -- there will be no intermediate MTAs doing stupid
things out of ignorance of the protocol, since a priority
parameter cannot be sent to any MTA that does not advertise it.
That is a small advantage for this case, although perhaps a
trivially small one.
john