On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
For example every ISP has to spend time and money helping their
customers to configure their email clients to locate their POP3, IMAP
and SUBMIT servers.
Those costs could be eliminated if email clients looked at the relevant
SRV records rather than requiring the user to become an administrator
and enter this data.
A matter that is close to my heart :-)
Why did this draft not get any further?
http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-hall-email-srv-02.txt
Looking back at something I wrote a year ago, I said that SRV records
don't provide higher-level settings, such as security requirements. The
email configuration problem is much more than just typing in the right
host names and port numbers: MUAs are generally dreadful at configuring
themselves securely using the in-band capabilities listed by the servers.
(e.g. whether to use TLS, what SASL mechanism to use, etc.) without
detailed hand-holding from the user.
In fact it would be pretty simple for an MUA to configure itself given
just an email address and some intelligent guesses, falling back to asking
the user for more information if the guesses fail. The intelligent guesses
are just based on informal host naming conventions (i.e. imap.domain,
smtp.domain, etc.) and standard port numbers, which together make SRV
redundant.
Tony.
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