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Re: I-D ACTION:draft-arun-ncc-smtp-02.txt

2005-04-14 07:04:45

On Thu April 14 2005 08:06, Arun Sankar wrote:

Yes there are utilities to this draft.

I have a few examples to explain the utilities,

In a company, a team of say 20 there could be 2 contracters who should 
not be given the details that are to be passed to the other 18, some 
company confidential data. Everytime there is something confidentail, 
there needs to be an individualistic mail-ids need to be typed and sent 
across.

The appropriate solution to that "problem" is to have a separate list
for confidential information distribution.  Any organization that has
given a moment's thought to security/confidentiality considerations
has already addressed that situation.  Under your scheme, real damage
can occur if some sender forgets to exclude somebody who should not
see confidential information, and/or if *any* component of message
composition, transport, or delivery fails to adopt the sweeping changes
proposed.

It could be  
something as serious as this to something as simple yet important of 
sending a surprise birthday party mail to an alias of friends but just 
want to neglect only the important person who is celebrating his/her b'day.

An appropriate solution to this unusual (once-in-a-while) "problem" would
be to simply send the message to the desired recipients rather than use
a list expander.  SMTP explicitly provides for sending to multiple
recipients (no extensions necessary, no changes to UAs, MTAs, etc.).
Your scheme would require massive changes to the entire installed base
of MUAs, MSAs, MTAs, and MDAs to be usable, and that's a huge overhead
for such an issue that arises only occasionally.

There could be innumerable situations, simple and complex wherein there 
needs to be a negation that is necesasry to help the user in making a 
few matters simplified.

More wishy-washy unclear hand-waving.  You have still not produced a
single compelling example.

Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear in my initial comments on the draft;
the underlying problem with all of the defects of the draft appears to
be that the author has not given due consideration to the issues as well
as to the procedures and policies.  I apologize for being unclear.  I
suggest that the author should carefully consider the documents to which
he has been referred and the comments made here and elsewhere, and then
carefully deliberate whether or not there is in fact a real "problem"
in search of a solution and if so what backwards compatible solutions
might be appropriate, or whether the proposal is a putative "solution"
in search of a nonexistent problem.