ietf-smtp
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Re: Submitting new SMTP related RFC drafts

2004-01-12 21:11:35
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 18:02:30 EST, Hector Santos 
<winserver(_dot_)support(_at_)winserver(_dot_)com>  said:

Is this mailing list a good place to bring up and discuss SMTP
ideas/extensions?

As good a place as any..

How about the current RFC 2821 document.  I have some concerns and comments
to make about it.  I don't wish to ruffle any feathers, make enemies  and
certainly, I don't wish to go over stuff already covered or being handled by
some group or person, etc.  I would like to do this the "right way."

A good way to do this is to ask "Has anybody ever thought about doing XYZ?".
Quite likely, either somebody has tried it, or thought about it.  If not, we'll 
be
happy to at least look at the idea.

If you have an idea for an ESMTP protocol extension, feel free to bring it up.
Don't bother trying to do an entire spec first, that's usually a bad idea.  
What you
want to start with are:

1) A problem statement: "I could tune my SMTP software to be much more efficient
if the other end told me XYZ up front.  Not knowing it means I have to do A, but
if I knew XYZ, I could optimize by doing B".

2) A *approach* to the problem - do you need to know XYZ per-recipient, or
per-connection, or would it make sense to cache it per-site or per-domain?

3) Spend at least a little time thinking about obvious problems - "XYZ only
makes sense within a domain", "You'd need prior arrangements to exchange data
before using XYZ", "A rogue client/server could horque things up by lying about
XYZ", and so on...

4) Be prepared for feedback, and be ready to incorporate it if it makes sense.
I can guarantee you that you'll possibly get anything from "http would be a
better way to attack that" to "that won't work because there's a requirement
ABC" to "if you're going to do that, think about this too"...

And if you get flamed, just remember - there's people on the list who are
generally listened to because they've been around and are generally wise and
worth listening to.  But I've said dumb things here and been told so, and even
having written RFC822 won't save you from being told that you've come up with a
bad idea, so don't take it personally. :)

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