Re: Setting the stage

On Jan 30, 2004, at 2:41 AM, Paul Smith wrote:

>
> I must admit, I'm having quite a hard time coming up with things that 
> I'd want in 'mail-ng', that I couldn't do with the current protocols 
> and some extensions..

I'll give you two:

real, honest to god, 8 bit transparency

and "kill the dot". If you've done any kind of serious email hacking, 
that phrase should make you twitch. And fundamentally, you can't take 
SMTP out of the 7bit, 1200 baud modem era and still realistically call 
it SMTP, or make it reasonably backwards compatible with SMTP.

> Maybe even some SMTP extensions could be made SMTP mandatory items.

god, no. there are so many hacks on hacks on hacks in SMTP that it's a 
wonder the damn setup just hasn't collapsed. (Oh, wait. some would say 
it has...). Simply rearranging the parts in an RFC doesn't fix any of 
that. This is a chance to take what we've learned, apply modern design 
methods to it, and move on to something that doesn't require a PhD to 
send a bloody message...

Only to find that a bunch of servers screw it up anyway, because 
they've mis-implemented part of the protocol.