While working on making a mail client, an important task is to make
work-arounds for badly implemented mail clients and -servers, and fix my
own spec violations. One of my hopes for mail-ng is that it will be easy
to implement, and not be forgiving about bad implementations. For a start,
these are a few ideas:
* Use an easily parsed timestamp (my advise: 64-bit number representing
timestamp and offset from UTC)
* Use one and only one charset (my advise: utf-8)
* Use one and only one content transfer encoding (my advise: 8-bit)
* Use an easily implemented envelope (my advise: xml or xml-lookalike,
with data-size attribute for a scheme identical to IMAP4 literals to
prevent a need for escaping)
In addition, internet is turning into a legal battleground rather fast
these days. I would like to have a header specifying the jurisdiction the
email is sent by. I expect spam to be a non-issue in mail-ng, but having a
jurisdiction header would make it easier to drop messages violating local
laws, as we currently see when the American lack of anti-spam laws cause
my Norwegian mbox to be filled with American spam that would be illegal to
send from Norway. Filtering based on the ISO Country Code List would be
much easier than keeping a list of IP ranges up to date.
--
Frode Gill