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Operations requirement: no hop-by-hop

2004-02-13 11:54:18

This may or may not be controversial, but I propose that a requirement for sane operations is that mail-ng be single hop. Multi-hop was a good design 20 years ago when many entities were not online all the time, but it has also proven to be a huge hurdle in extending SMTP.

From an operational standpoint, a single-hop design makes many other parts of the design much cleaner. It is also easier to explain to users.

Of course, if the receiving MTA wants to re-send a message to another MTA instead of writing it to the message store, that's fine. However, doing so is not part of the specification. That is, the protocol specifies just originator->origMTA->recMTA->receiver or originator->recMTA->receiver, but does not specify origMTA->otherMTA->recMTA.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium


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