Re: IM2000 Won't Be Worth It

Charles Cazabon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Jon, you appear to have already decided that the basis of IM2000 (sender
> stores undelivered mail instead of recipient) is a failure from the get-go.
> That's fine; you're entitled to your opinion.  But in that case, please
> unsubscribe from the mailing list and let the rest of us deal with /real/
> design issues instead of your continuous stream of straw men and red herrings.

Nobody has yet found a "straw man" or "red herring" amongst anything
I've said. I originally saw djb's im2000 proposal several years ago
and thought it sounded potentially interesting. It's a "neat idea".
It's certainly interesting to think about in terms of a "what would
happen if we did things like that" thought experiment.

At the time I wrote my original message to the list my opinion was
fairly neutral. I was interested in the idea and wanted to see if the
flaws that were apparent at first sight were somehow solved on further
examination.

However, the increasingly-feeble counter-arguments to my observations
are actually pushing me towards the opinion that it is indeed an
interesting but useless idea. Yes, it clearly would be possible to set
up a mail system based upon the IM2000 concepts - but would it be
*better* than the current system?

The main arguments seem to be that it would somehow reduce spam,
without there being any clear picture of precisely *why* it would do
any such thing, and that message bounces are somehow inherently bad,
again without any clear explanation of *why* bounces are bad and what
we would have instead.

Yes, the Internet mail system clearly needs improvement, and, gosh,
wouldn't it be exciting to be involved at the beginning in what turned
out to be the new global mail standard! But unless you can come up
with some actual tangible benefits, and some way to resolve the many
disadvantages, why do you think that it will ever happen?