One of the nasty features of Gateways is that they are
generally forced to
lose information, just because some of it cannot be translated.
I'm not talking about gateways. I'm talking about protocol switching at the
originating client.
The problems of X.400 and Bitnet are not something I want to repeat. This is
not the time to go back to to EBSIDC.
The core problem of email as far as I am concerned is the interminable
forwarding problem. Each link the message gets sent over has a potential for
failure.
We are breaking something fundamental to the Internet model here, we are
putting complexity in the core of the Internet. Worse, we are doing it
without recognising what we are doing.
I think there is certainly a case to be made for the three corner
client-server-client model and even a case to be made for the
client-server-server-client four corners model of messaging transfer. But I
would like to get away from the email model where messages bounce aimlessly
from server to server without a concrete idea of where they came from or
where they are headed.