On 5-feb-04, at 19:50, Keith Moore wrote:
- users want to be able to use email in ad-hoc environments where no
servers are available and/or make use of ad-hoc environments to
expedite mail delivery (especially of large messages)
can you clarify or elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by this one.
Suppose we're both at an IETF meeting or such, and you want to email me
the latest list of goals, which is now 25 MB. If your setup is anything
like mine, the message will first travel back to a place close to your
office, then to mine and finally back to whereever the meeting is held.
This is enough of an inconvenience to create some special case logic
that makes it possible for the file, if not the rest of the message, to
be delivered from your computer to mine directly.
The next step would be when some people meet in a place with no
network, open up their laptops and create an ad-hoc network, and then
get to email eachother directly from one laptop to another, without any
help from mail- or even DNS servers.
(Apple is doing some excellent work on this with other applications
under the name rendezvous by leveraging multicast DNS.)
I think it would be useful to sharpen our thinking to work (for at
least a while) under the assumption that with mailng everything that is
done with SMTP, POP, IMAP and HTTP is now done using a single protocol,
so there is no artificial dichotomoy between servers and clients.