On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 08:10, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
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.
I've had some similar ideas while planning my own mail-ng system, and the
general conclusion I reached was that we need to decouple email addresses
from the DNS, or at least loosen the coupling.
At the moment, the "right hand side" of an email address is a DNS name, with
DNS-based rules for resolving it to a destination mail host. This
relationship between the right hand side and the DNS is implicit. If it were
to be explicit instead of implicit, then other mail-address-resolving
mechanisms could be introduced, such as may be useful for mail communication
in an ad hoc group.
I'll attempt to express this in terms of a user want.
- In a next generation mail system, users may want to address each other in
ways that are not possible in the existing system. The possibilities are
limited only by imagination (and implementability), but one obvious example
is a self-configuring ad hoc LAN (wireless, perhaps), in which the users may
want to send messages and/or files to each other without the presence of
traditional domain-based MTAs advertised by DNS.
Regards,
TFBW