At 10:40 AM 6/26/2001, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
>I venture to guess that people will drop max-priority mail because so much
>of it is spam, just like people now drop mail from <>.
The proposal for a priority bit is an attempt to provide a degree of
quality of service.
We have a 30+ year history that an inadequately specified "priority" field
will go unused.
Actually we have exactly the opposite. We have at least two inadequately
specified QoS mechanisms for email already (priority and precedence header
fields), and both of them are in wide use. Support isn't universal by any
means, but it definitely is widespread. Had there been a standard 10 years ago
I suspect support for these really would be universal at this point.
Take a look at arpanet/internet level packet
switching. The last 6 years of work on IPv6 shows that trying to provide
useful QoS is quite difficult.
The differing time regimes makes this a very different problem, so I'm not sure
you can extrapolate from it.
As noted by others, without the rest of the total system specification, the
priority field will be mis-used by a variety of senders. This will
guarantee that it be ignored by relays.
The existing ad-hoc fields are misused, but not enough to make relays
universally ignore them.
Ned