Folks,
Please indicate some historical basis for moving an installed base of
users on this kind of scale and for this kind of reason.
EAH> Notwithstanding the overly-specific nature of the request, I can think of
EAH> two off the top of my head, which are FTP/Gopher->HTTP and POP->IMAP.
HTTP can reasonably be considered a replacement for Anonymous FTP,
during an academic discussion. The massive difference in the service
experience makes this a less-than-practical comparison, when discussion
an email transition. So does the massive difference in scaling issues
for the 1989 timeframe, versus now.
The POP->IMAP example is excellent, since it really demonstrates my
point. IMAP is rather popular in some local area network environments.
However it's long history has failed utterly to seriously displace POP
on a global scale.
EAH> Large-scale mail carriers would probably switch quickly if
EAH> the accountability feature proved useful,
and now we are back to hypothesizing about the behaviors of
mega-corporations with massive installed bases and a rather poor history
of adopting changes from the IETF community.
Seriously folks, if discussion about changes is going to be productive,
it needs to pay much more realistic attention to history and pragmatics
of ISP operations and average-user preferences.
d/
--
Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
Sunnyvale, CA USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>