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

2004-02-01 09:15:04

On 1-feb-04, at 9:22, Dave Crocker wrote:

State the issues in entirely non-technical terms.  What enhancements
do we seek, in terms that are visible and important to end-users and
to operators?  No reference to protocols or formats is permitted.
Talk only in terms of user interactions and operator actions.

Ok. The main thing that I desire from a new mail system is more control over the mail I receive, and better feedback over what I send. Because I run a business, I need to be able to receive mail from people I don't know. However, I want to be sure it's actual _people_ sending me messages and not robots programmed to abuse the mail system. I now have decent anti-spam software, but the trouble is that I still have to go through all rejected messages to see whether there are any false positives. What I want is that a message that my system labels as spam receives a reply that my software thinks this is spam and please try again. What I DON'T want is to receive bounces for all those messages that are really spam and used a fake return address.

Another important feature would be smarter routing of large messages. It seems pretty silly to me that when I'm sending a message to someone sitting next to me at some conference, the message often travels halfway around the world.

For example, we want users to be able to exchange email in their
native language.

I think most of them already do that...

We want them to be able to have addresses that are
expressed in their native character sets.

This is very dangerous anyone having a non-latin email address can't expect to receive mail from people who don't master this character set. So someone who speeks a non-latin language as well as a latin one, would always have to provide two representations of his/her email address in order to be reachable in both languages.