Re: IM2000 Won't Be Worth It

>[email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > It might also automatically retrieve only the summary headers of all of
>> > her other waiting messages, which she can look through /offline/ and
>> > decide which to ignore and which to retreive automatically the /next/ time
>> > she's online for a minute or two.
>> 
>> I thought about that. But it is often the case that you decide whether to
>> retrieve certain messages based on reading first some related messages.
>> Think of how you might decide to read a thread on a mailinglist: you read
>> the first message, and then you may decide not to even look at the other
>> messages in the thread.
>
>Yes, but IM2000 covers that.  The summary-only information includes enough
>information to determine whether the message is part of a thread you're
>interested in (References:, Message-ID:).  If you tell your IM2000 MUA
>"retrieve this thread" (explicitly, or implicitly by reading it perhaps) it
>can retrieve all the messages in the thread without retrieving the
>bodies/complete headers of other messages.

POP3/IMAP can't do that, can't be improved to do that?  Surely you
don't mean we need to deploy a new mail *transfer* protocol (IM2000)
to implement new mail *user* agent features, so...

...what you really seem to mean is, the big savings here with IM2000
is that messages you don't choose to read don't even get *pulled* over
the wire, while others can and will be, automatically, via connections
to threads people care about.

That raises some interesting points for this specific case, which are
really just variations of stuff I've pointed out before in general
situations:

  -  Does this mean that, for a site supporting 100 users who are on
     the same mailing list, a given message posted to the list will
     likely be pulled over the wire 100 or so times, each on behalf of
     a recipient, since each recipient will be choosing when and how
     much of a message to read?

     Or will sites like that have to run local caching proxies for
     IM2000 (yet another server to set up and maintain), to emulate
     what is presently accomplished via SMTP's multi-RCPT feature,
     namely, sending a single copy down the wire and letting the local
     system make multiple copies for users?

  -  If the sending list's outgoing message store happens to be
     unavailable when a recipient wants to browse the incoming
     messages from that list, will he be able to read those
     messages?

     Or, for lists with messages remaining on submitter's message
     stores, what happens to the thread, as seen by the reader, when
     *some* of those stores happen to be unavailable just when he goes
     to read that thread?

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