New subscriber has questions

Hi all,

Just subscribed yesterday, and I have a few questions:

* Is this mailing list active?

* Are there any existing implementations on IM2000?

* If so, how many users does it have?

* If "nothing in the recipient notification that reaches the recipient 
MUA is directly specified as part of the message by the message 
originator", how does the recipient determine whether to request message 
headers or the entire message? If requesting "summary headers" is the 
answer, then how is that superior to including the summary headers in 
the notification (and perhaps imposing hard limits on how much data that 
can include)?

* If the "no headers in the notification" concept sticks, will it be 
possible to request summary headers over the existing connection when 
receiving a notification? (If you're going to request summary headers 
for every message anyway, which I imagine many will, it would be nice to 
be able to avoid the overhead of setting up another connection every 
time to do it).

* Going a little farther than the previous, would it be possible to 
automatically request the entire message over the notification 
connection (which you'd only do from known trusted senders of course)?

* When requesting summary headers or entire messages, can the requesting 
software indicate in its request that it's an automated request vs. a 
request made in response to a user action (so that the sender will be 
able to tell the difference between their message having been read...or 
at least noticed and downloaded intentionally...and having simple been 
retrieved but perhaps not seen by human eyes)?

* Can a message sender indicate an expiration time after which the 
message will be deleted from their store?  (If so, I'd suggest the 
timestamp be TRANSMITTED as "seconds from now" to avoid ambiguity over 
timezones or computers with their clocks set wrong.)

* If the spam-deterrent built in to IM2000 is based on shifting costs to 
senders, is it expected that the STORAGE cost would provide sufficient 
deterrent, or that the storage + DELIVERY cost would be the deterrent. 
It seems to me that storage costs alone might not be much deterrent -- 
after all, you could store one message and send 10 billion notifications 
about it. You could even use different message IDs for each recipient 
but have some way to tell that they're the same message (eg. start all 
of the IDs with "1234567890" and tack on "asdf" for one recipient, 
"qwerty" for another, etc.

* Is there a provision for requesting something like a captcha in order 
to get greylisted and get your notifications delievered?

I'm feeling the pain of SMTP right now, so I've got a little fire in my 
belly, and the only cure is more cowbell...er, replacing SMTP:

http://antone.geckotribe.com/alpha-gecko/anybody-wanna-join-me-in-a-day-without-email-smtp/

Antone Roundy