This is a good list Nathaniel.
Paul, I am sorry I am not familiar with all of the current proposals so cannot
judge if any suggestion I might make is under consideration or not.
I would like language negotiation to be considered, especially as machine
translation improves.
I imagine it will be easier for messages to be sent in more than one language,
but I really don't want to receive a mail with 20 translations of the same
message. Language negotiation would allow senders to (dynamically) provide the
most appropriate language version to me.
At the same time, it might be nice if the receiving agent could integrate with
automated translation services and present me with messages in my language, if
I wanted such a service.
It would also be nice to have the spam I receive, in various languages that I
can't read, simply be rejected at the protocol level, but that can be dealt
with in other ways.
Two other requests:
An expiration date, so that mail that is of a timely nature simply evaporates
if not delivered before the expiration.
Useful for conference, sales, and other announcements, which could just go away
if sent to someone who is on vacation, etc.
(Don't use up resources to store a message of no further value.)
Ability to recall a mail. I know this sounds a little silly, but for a message
that is still undelivered to many destinations, it may be worthwhile to be able
to cancel it and contain the damage. There may be legal or security reasons to
stop the spread of the email, and to the extent a message containing viruses or
other harmful contents, if there is a way to identify it and prevent its
further spread, it would be very useful to curtail it.
I realize this comes with a host of other issues, such as under what
circumstances is one privileged to cancel a mail, but as long as we are
blue-skying...
tex
Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
[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
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Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:Tex(_at_)XenCraft(_dot_)com
Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com
XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com
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