mail-ng
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: visions

2004-02-23 16:54:11

On 23-feb-04, at 21:27, Markus Stumpf wrote:

If you want something radical, a while ago I started thinking about a
situation where there is no general connectivity, but people roam
around with mobile clients. A way to distribute mail in such an
environment would be to exchange copies with everyone you meet and then
after some time the message should eventually be delivered.

I like this idea. However I have a vision of people running around
with their mobile device yelling "how has my message"? :-)

(-: Well the answer would of course be: everyone. They made it work on ships with paper mail in the good old days, so doing it in lap- and palmtops using electrons shouldn't be a problem.

Timely delivery would be a problem. But maybe the system could transport something like a broadcast "who has user <address>" and if the destination is reachable it would calculate a shortest path and deliver the message.

You are forgetting there is no connectivity. So sending control messages makes no sense. But as long as the network doesn't grow too big and enough people exchange data on a regular basis, email should get through within a reasonable time. (Remember intercontinental mail took a week with Fidonet.)

what we do over the web these days could be done just as well or even
better by email or by a combination of email and web.

The combination is already in place (but we may not be the target group ;-)
A lot of customers and friend receive newsletters and nearly every
newsletter today is either pure HTML or at least multipart/alternativ.
What they do send with the email is the HTML code but all the inline
objects like sounds and music are retrieved from the webserver.

That's a good start, but we can do better than that.

Ted Nelson proposed a docuverse (document universe) where "Everything
    should be available to everyone. Any user should be able to follow
origins and links of material across boundaries of documents, servers,
    networks, and individual implementations. There should be a unified
    environment available to everyone providing access to this whole
    space." (Nelson 1987).
Of course the above is a little too wide as some documents should be
private to users or groups and as I said before we need authorization
and authentication.

Maybe the goal should be that the user doesn't have to choose between
email, FTP, HTTP, ... but simply chooses a document and whether to send
or to receive it and the system would decide the best way.

What I imagine is a system where control messages are sent in a way that is similar to current email. For really short messages with no special handling requirements the actual content could be part of the control message, but for larger messages either the mail server or mail client decide to go back to the source and download the content if they can determine this is in conformance with the user's policy. In other situations the user just sees a header, or maybe a header and the text but not any attachments, and the missing parts are downloaded interactively when the user opens them. This has several advantages:

- anything that looks like spam can be rejected = not downloaded, if this is a false positive the sender can transmit a new control message because they see the message body is never requested - large attachments are only transmitted when the user wants to receive them
- content negotiation is now possible

Obviously there is a performance hit as rather than a -> b we now need a -> b, b -> a and a -> b again so it all takes longer.

And while email is easy to toss around and forward most people imply
the agreement of the author of the email to do so. Putting something
on the web
a) makes it easier to find it again (fixed location)

Can't we come up with msgids that make it possible to hunt down a message and request a copy based on only the msgid? These would have to look like URLs then.


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>