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Re: comments on draft-crocker-email-arch-01

2004-12-23 19:22:09


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Leslie" <john(_at_)jlc(_dot_)net>
To: "Tony Finch" <dot(_at_)dotat(_dot_)at>
Cc: <ietf-smtp(_at_)imc(_dot_)org>
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:13 PM
Subject: Re: comments on draft-crocker-email-arch-01


   I find Tony's usage far more comfortable -- in that I can actually
explain it to someone and hope to get the idea across. IMHO, Dave is too
hung up on parallels to postal mail, and is thinking "envelope
information"
should mean anything which would normally be recorded on the envelope.
Personally, I'd prefer to reserve "envelope" for Tony's meaning, and coin
another term -- perhaps something akin to "routing information" for Dave's
meaning.

   Obviously, everone's mileage-may-vary...

   But I think there's a very good case for defining separate terms for
these two meanings.

Taken into account other networks we have experience in, "Network Control
Lines or Transport Information," were the technical terms used.  Envelope
was used more for the layman.

Fidonet, QWK, UTI, and the Internet all share the common layout.  Some are
binary versus text based.  But they all had:

    Network Control lines
    Header Lines
    Message Body

The internet RFC 2821/2882 I believe calls the Network control line "trace
information."

The Network Control lines usually did match the transport information and
this is also true with SMTP in the case that we add two transport lines to
the network control block:

    Return-Path
    Received:

Fidonet, for example, added:

    ^aPID:
    ^aTID:
    ^aREPLY:

PID/TID (Process and transaction ID) is a skin to a Received line. and the
Reply was the "return path."   We called these Network control information.

Since Fidonet had a binary format, control lines were not limited to the top
of the blocks. It could be embedded it th body, but in general, it was the
TOP and BOTTOM of a message block:

For example, in a Fidonet group mail disitrbution (i.e, News for the
Internet), these were added to the bottom of each message as it was streamed
thru the network:

    ^aPath:  Host tracing
    ^aSeen-By: Nodes with Host tracing

This allowed for tracing and also dupe processing. It was serious hanging
offense to create dupes in the network.

In any case, I like Transport information for SMTP and Network Control lines
for headers added to the RFC x822 header that is part of the distribution,
not necessary concerned for the user consumption.

Sincerely,

Hector Santos, CTO
Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com
305-431-2846 Cell
305-248-3204 Office