Which reminds me. How is a MUA supposed to find its submit server?
The same way an MUA finds an SMTP server to submit mail.
I think above refers to that SMTP and POP3/IMAP server names are
preconfigured in the mail client setup for each user.
That does not however means we can not provide default values that lot
less advanced users could find usefull and passing default values to user
for certain protocols is not really SUBMIT protocol only question (i.e.
not really for ietf-smtp). The protocol that is often used to pass on
default parameters for host configuration is DHCP when it provides
computers with ip address, dns server name, etc. if you look at IETF
work, I beliebve "Service Location Protocol" (see RFC2608) could be the
new generation version ofthat. I'm not sure if anybody actually ever
attempted to use that for configuring default SUBMIT server name - that
would require extension to client mail program obviously, but I dont see
why it would not work if the functionality was written. Perhaps if some
enterprise mail package vendor would implement it and pitch it along to
their fortune500 clients as great new "feature", word would spread and
eventually this might get implemented by others...
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net