On 1/23/2004 6:40 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
I would be happy, indeed delighted, to be wrong, but I see just
about no hope for designing and deploying a completely new email
structure. More on that in draft-klensin-emailaddr-02.txt,
which I hope I can get wrapped up and posted on Monday or
Tuesday (it is a fairly major revision of the ideas in -01).
I disagree, but I'll read your draft when it's published anyway. From a
design perspective (or rather, ignoring the installed base as a criteria
of 'design', which is the usual and erroneous counter-argument), SMTP is
broken. The layering is munged and none of the advanced features will work
right until the transfer-headers and data-headers are clearly separated (I
know you're advocating a slight separation here, but that'll only get you
so far). Also, the messaging network is mostly limited to per-hop
negotiation, and does not provide the kind of end-to-end negotiation
(which is still possible in a store-and-forward environment) that is going
to be necessary for advanced features.
I agree with most of the rest of your message. I do not think it is
possible to do that with the existing infrastructure.
http://www.ehsco.com/misc/mt2/ has an outline of a replacement service
that covers most of the same ground and goes a fair bit further, the
latter of which is afforded by the fact that it's a wholesale replacement
[and no, Valdis, it doesn't require everybody to upgrade first :)]. I had
meant to get into I-D form last year but I've got too many other pro-bono
projects going already to take on another one. Steal as you wish.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/