Re: SPF is harmful. Adopt it.

>Thus said James Craig Burley on 06 Mar 2004 16:54:06 GMT:
>
>> (And, again,  this can't be done  at all in IM2000-land  if the remote
>> message store  is unavailable. I know  a message is waiting  for me; I
>> just can't see it. I think that'd be very frustrating.)
>
>How is this different from temporarily deferring the message in SMTP and
>then  having the  sender's  SMTP server  go down  while  you decide  you
>actually want it? Oh I see,  you scanned the message once already during
>DATA and stored a local copy even though you told the sender's server to
>defer  and retry  again  later? Now  you have  duplicate  copies of  the
>message floating around.

Yup.  Sorta like having duplicate copies of web pages floating around,
for lower latencies, better uptime, etc., via proxies, caches, etc.

>Obviously you couldn't reject  the message the
>next time it  tries to be delivered

Sure, the SMTP server might do that if it decided (based on user input
via his MUA) that the message shouldn't have been delivered in the
first place.  Not as elegant as with IM2000, of course!

>so you would have to  accept it and
>then discard it since you presumably  already have a copy, thus doubling
>your SMTP bandwidth on messages that you want.

Indeed, rejecting a locally cached message requires receiving it all
over again first.  Not as nice as with IM2000, definitely.

>Did I  just misinterpret what  you suggest? If  this isn't what  you are
>suggesting, then  having an SMTP  server that you  told to defer  and an
>IM2000 message store go down are essentially the same.

No, I think you interpreted it correctly.

The question really boils down to, will people be willing to wait an
arbitrarily long period of time to read the *contents* of messages
that they see summaries of in their in-boxes?

And, if they aren't, will any local caching that they (or their ISPs)
perform on their behalf lessen IM2000's advantages over SMTP, possibly
to the point where it isn't really worth deploying IM2000, given that
SMTP already *is* deployed?

-- 
James Craig Burley
Software Craftsperson
<http://www.jcb-sc.com>