Re: Setting the stage

At 17:13 30/01/2004, Chuq Von Rospach 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.

Actually, those are two reasons that I think are NOT good enough to warrant 
discarding SMTP..

Neither of those reasons will bother your average user in the slightest! If 
you are going to ditch SMTP and come up with something better, then it 
needs to be something that people WANT to move to, otherwise it'll just 
die. Making it easier to implement isn't a good reason. It needs to be 
better to USE..

>>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...).

No, you didn't read far enough. Having mandatory SMTP extensions - eg 8 bit 
data would be fine IF it was called a different protocol and didn't have to 
maintain backwards compatibility with SMTP - eg on a different port with 
gateways to communicate with SMTP servers. We'll need gateways anyway for 
whatever new protocol is designed (if any), so why throw away the good with 
the bad.

>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...

Actually, that's not the problem.. It's really incredibly simple to send a 
message using SMTP.. The problem is with the RECEIVING of messages (from 
lots of different places) and the NOT RECEIVING of messages you don't want..

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

That's why you make 'SMTPV2' incompatible with SMTP, but built on the same 
building blocks to aid migration.


Paul				VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
[email protected]			http://www.pscs.co.uk/