OK, so it's been a week, and about 400 messages. Lots of good
requirements have been suggested (and, unfortunately, lots of
protocol designs have already been floated...). This list is clearly
useful for generating ideas. However, the volume has proven too high
for some people who have let me know they are unsubscribing.
To help facilitate forward motion on requirements writing, it would
be great if multiple people would start collecting ideas for
requirements into lists and posting those lists on web sites. If you
are doing that, please let me know the URL that folks can use to see
what you are doing. I'll post the URLs on the main web page for this
list (which is <http://www.imc.org/mail-ng/>, in case you have
forgotten it...). Your list doesn't have to be inclusive; it can
focus on just one part of the next-generation problem.
So far, I have two listed:
<http://james.seng.cc/wiki/wiki.cgi?Mail-NG> from James Seng
<http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/user-visible-email-ng-goals.html>
from Keith Moore
I think having another handful that grow in different ways and with
different focuses would be good so that folks on this list can see
where different people go when they think of "requirements".
In specific, I would love to see the lists broken down into
mostly-separable parts of the next-generation protocol (such as
"message transport", "message format", "message display", and so on).
Doing so will help those who are new to designing systems from
scratch to see that it isn't all one hunk, even though it may appear
to be.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium