On 7/8/01 at 10:56 PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
I think the problem here is the characterization of this proposal as
an end-to-end QoS-assurance mechanism...
The draft certainly makes no such characterization.
...rather than just a way that trusted and authenticated parties can
request priority handling of important messages through those parts
of the mail system that trust their credentials and are willing to
do that.
The decision to allow priority requests may not be based on
identifying trusted and authenticated parties at all. A particular
server for a mailing list may decide that its external spam blocking
software is enough protection against unwanted attacks and that
anyone sending to the mailing list (authenticated or not) may set
their priorities as they choose: Perhaps people who bother to
contribute to this especially esoteric mailing list can, on the
whole, be trusted not to abuse priority setting.
Of course, the tools need to be available to only prioritize mail
from authenticated and trusted parties for this to be a general and
ubiquitous end-to-end service. But let's work on the tools first, and
see if the general service falls out, or we end up with only a
"consenting adults" service.
If we're trying to do the end-to-end QoS, I have huge doubts about
our being able to make that happen.[...]
OTOH, If we're just trying to design a standard interface to a
general-purpose mechanism for requesting priority handling among
mutually consenting parties, that's much easier, and IMHO quite
doable.
It very well may be that we can't do the former. However, I think we
are reasonably able to do design that leaves room for the former if
we get all of the other pieces in place, and settle for the latter
either for the time being or never if we can't get the pieces in
place. (Mail still isn't internationalized well, but leaving a
charset label in MIME and pushing UTF-8 where we can may end us up in
that place in the long run.)
pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102