a few short notes
2004-02-01 08:56:28
[As the traffic for this list is significant and there are lots of
things I want to respond to, I'm responding to several points in a
single message.]
XML for headers: this is a *very* bad idea. I guess it is sometimes
appropriate to use something as heavy as XML for the content, which is
generated once and decoded once, but using this encoding that is
expensive to manipulate and hard to implement efficiently at
intermediate hops makes no sense.
I'm not convinced that using non-ASCII characters in headers is a good
idea either. Headers must be simple and unambiguous. Having text in
them that your computer can't even display and if it can, 99% of the
world population can't spell, isn't a good idea.
Maybe it makes sense to have different types of headers: ones that are
relevant to the sender and recipient only, so they can be in any
format, and others that must be more general so they must be in ASCII.
Mandatory authentication is also a bad idea IMO. Obviously
authentication is very important and must be supported so that people
who only want to receive mail from verifyable sources get to implement
this policy, but that doesn't mean that we should force *everyone* to
use such a policy.
Chris Bonatti had something to say about multicast. Obviously this is
something that applies to mailinglist rather than one-to-one messages.
See http://www.muada.com/projects/usenet.txt for something like this
but different that I think would work over a reliable multicast
transport protocol.
Important point: as long as email is a store and forward mechanism,
encrypting the transport makes little sense: encryption should be
end-to-end.
Someone made the point that it is hard / impossible to negotiate
parameters across multiple hops. I see no reason why this should be the
case if we create a new kind of message: the control message. If we
accept that the delivery of one message containing actual content may
require several control messages to flow back and forth between the
source and the destination, then this is no problem at all. Obviously
this is more expensive in terms of transaction overhead and bandwidth
(and it takes longer) but if this leads to less spam, worms and bounces
for messages I never sent in the first place, I can certainly live with
that.
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- a few short notes,
Iljitsch van Beijnum <=
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