Paul: --
What you say makes very good sense to me, because the current Internet is
capable of single-hop delivery across the great central part of the Internet,
but has no say about what happens to a message sent to a mailing list expander,
or a corporate firewall, (or a home firewall for that matter)!
And, i might add, it is a very good thing that the internet does not have
control of what happens in mailing list expanders or inside corporate
private networks.
Your proposal follows the rules of good organizational buffering logic.
Cheers...\Stef
At 20:21 -0800 3/10/04, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
At 2:33 PM -0800 3/10/04, Dave Crocker wrote:
Paul,
PHI> The mail-ng transport protocol should be designed to only know about
PHI> a single hop, from sender to recipient. The sender may have multiple
PHI> hops to a designated transport agent, and the receiving transport
PHI> agent may have multiple hops to a mailstore, but the transport
PHI> protocol should not make any accommodation for these additional hops
PHI> other than to allow them to add metadata to the transit stream. These
PHI> requirements are to make the protocol more sensible and to limit the
PHI> responsibility of operators to just what they control.
How is this different from the current SMTP model?
In the current SMTP model, I believe we have been restricted from having SMTP
options that "speak for" SMTP servers further in the chain. For example, we
were prevented from making a "NO UCE" banner because there was no way for the
server making that claim to know what SMTP servers behind it would have as
policy. Different but just as complex logic was used in 8BITMIME.
I am proposing that we think of transport as just between two transport
agents. What the receiving agent does with the message is not part of the
protocol. Said another way, the transport protocol should not have rules that
tell receiving agents what kind of policy decisions they need to transmit
further down the line.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium