Let me add a little to the requirements list and agree with Nathan that that is
where we should start. Some requirements that do not seem to be met all that
well at present
The capacity to determine that the sender is a valid address for sending email
at the site involved
The capacity to determine that the "From" field actually indicates who the
message is from
The capacity to authenticate the sender.
The purpose of these suggestions is to take measures which will make it more
difficult to send spam mail of the Viagra type or to circulate worms and
viruses of many types.
----- Original Message -----
From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)guppylake(_dot_)com>
Date: Friday, January 30, 2004 8:30 am
Subject: Why are we here? What are our goals?
[Sincere thanks to Paul for starting this list.]
As I stated on another mailing list, I'd like to see our email-ng
efforts start with requirements analysis. However, I've always
found
it useful to start by compiling a wishlist, as raw data for
requirements abstraction and tradeoff analysis. So I'd like to
start a
wish list of "plausible stuff it would be cool to include in email-
ng."
Here's what I've got so far (I don't actually advocate all of
these):
-- internationalization, esp. of addresses
-- enhanced tracing mechanisms
-- generalized challenge/response mechanisms
-- transport-level authentication
-- binary transport (phasing out C-T-E's)
-- Cleaner separation of header, envelope, and body
-- structured local-part syntax
-- economic mechanisms (postage, attention bonds)
I suggest that we try to grow this into a highly inclusive list of
"desirable things" and then attempt to determine a sensible subset
to
work on. -- Nathaniel