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Re: [ietf-smtp] Email standard revision, was address maximum length

2019-11-26 00:14:34
On 11/25/2019 8:40 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
*0. Are there known deficiencies with the current documents which could be addressed by revising them.*

If the answer to that is NO then obviously the others don't matter.


Hmmm. What I advised was intentionally more elaborate than your terse summary and that's because the really important process is in the effort to answer the simple question you offer. That's why I think it is important to focus on the substance that permits being able to answer it compellingly.

There is a common view that the important work of an organization like the IETF is producing standards, but really those documents are just side-effects. Those documents fail when the real work isn't done, namely developing meaningful community participation that establishes that it wants the documents and can (and will) use them.

The substance of figuring out what work on email specs needs to be done is developing a community assessment that has more than a tiny number of well-intentioned folk, and that actually represents desire of the larger email community.

The fact that there is -- and, unfortunately, always has been -- so much ad hoc deviation from the email specs suggests an ongoing failure to develop and use that community adequately. There's no comfort in the fact that this is not just a problem for email specs, given how much proprietary ad hocery there is elsewhere in the stack.

d/

--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

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