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RE: Why are we here? What are our goals?

2004-01-29 20:38:12

E-Mail protocols are increasingly being called on
as a central component in very large scale voice
mail (and other) service platforms. I believe that 
some of the requirements work should explicitly look
in this direction (where the "client" is a large server or
server farm). A review of what the issues are with
the current protocols in this environment would 
probably be in order and no doubt arrive at many
of the same point below. And almost certainly some
new ones such as:

    -- Streaming media
    -- Notification Mechanisms
    -- Provisioning Standardization

-----Original Message-----
From: Nathaniel Borenstein [mailto:nsb(_at_)guppylake(_dot_)com]
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:30 PM
To: mail-ng(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
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