Re: New proposal for the interactive message tracking protocol

Roland Brand wrote:
> 
> I would like to start discussion about a counter-proposal for a message
> tracking system.
> 
> This solution fits to the post-hoc model defined in the model document.
> Instead of adding a new command to SMTP for tracking, I would rather
> create a new tracking protocol. SMTP would then only have to be slightly
> adapted, so that it logs every message traversal. The logged information
> would have to be written to a database in a unified way, so that every
> message gets a unique tracking identifier, as described in the model
> document.
> 
> A special tracking entity would then use this database to answer tracking
> requests. These requests use some form of authenticator, which may be the
> one described in the model document.
> 
> The user would then have a tracking agent, which collects the information
> about a particular message from the different tracking entities.
> 
> The advantages of this solution are:
> 
> 1. The same tracking protocol can also be used for other systems than
> SMTP. It could then provide information about the whereabouts of a message
> in an X.400 or even a proprietary system. Furthermore there could be
> information as "fetched through POP3" and so on.
> 
> 2. The tracking activity is kept away from the e-mail system, so that an
> SMTP server cannot be saturated with tracking requests by malicious users.
> 
> 3. It requires only slight changes in SMTP, namely to generate the logs.
> This prevents us from creating a real monster of a protocol.
> 
> From my point of view the protocol independency mentioned in point 1 is of
> primary importance, since it increases the quality of the tracking service
> a lot. The other protocols would only have to create the same kind of log
> entries, so that the software used for tracking could be remain exactly
> the same.
> 
> I am about to build a prototype implementation during my diploma thesis at
> the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and I would appreciate to get
> your opinion on it.
> 
> Yours sincerely
> 
> ---
> Roland Brand
> Student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
> [email protected]