On Jan 30, 2004, at 2:41 AM, Paul Smith wrote:
I must admit, I'm having quite a hard time coming up with things that
I'd want in 'mail-ng', that I couldn't do with the current protocols
and some extensions..
I'll give you two:
real, honest to god, 8 bit transparency
and "kill the dot". If you've done any kind of serious email hacking,
that phrase should make you twitch. And fundamentally, you can't take
SMTP out of the 7bit, 1200 baud modem era and still realistically call
it SMTP, or make it reasonably backwards compatible with SMTP.
Maybe even some SMTP extensions could be made SMTP mandatory items.
god, no. there are so many hacks on hacks on hacks in SMTP that it's a
wonder the damn setup just hasn't collapsed. (Oh, wait. some would say
it has...). Simply rearranging the parts in an RFC doesn't fix any of
that. This is a chance to take what we've learned, apply modern design
methods to it, and move on to something that doesn't require a PhD to
send a bloody message...
Only to find that a bunch of servers screw it up anyway, because
they've mis-implemented part of the protocol.