User benefits of mail-ng

At 08:22 01/02/2004, Dave Crocker wrote:
>State the issues in entirely non-technical terms.  What enhancements
>do we seek, in terms that are visible and important to end-users and
>to operators?  No reference to protocols or formats is permitted.
>Talk only in terms of user interactions and operator actions.
>
>For example, we want users to be able to exchange email in their
>native language.

Yes
Actually, AIUI, this is possible now... (Given the amount of spam email I 
get in Russian & Chinese, it looks like it..)

Maybe the requirement would be to have more interoperable use of email with 
different native languages.

>   We want them to be able to have addresses that are
>expressed in their native character sets.

I have difficulty with this one. OK, I'm English, so may be biased. But if 
I received an email in English from someone with a Chinese email address, 
I'd have great difficulty handling that email address.. I believe I'd have 
more trouble dealing with that email address than the person in China would 
have with dealing with my email address. Computers in general don't handle 
non-US character sets very well.

So, I can see the use of native character set email addresses within a 
locality, but not across character set boundaries - that would cause big 
problems. The issue is how to deal with it.

>Perhaps we want senders to be accountable, so that problems with their
>posting can be traced back to them.  Or at least, we want _someone_ to
>be accountable for the postings.  Or perhaps we want to provide a
>means that takes note of senders who are willing to be accountable,
>and correctly distinguishes them from senders who are not willing.

Yes, any or all of those.

>We want people to be able to exchange email with any type of content.
>(Hmmm.  They already can do that.  So is the new requirement that we
>want them to be able to do this with smaller messages?)

That's not one of my key requirements. If a new email protocol is going to 
be designed, then it'd be sensible to add this as well, but it's not a good 
enough reason to have a redesign.

I'd also have:
- be able to decide whether to accept an email before I get it (ie be able 
to examine message characteristics before receiving it)

- Increased reliability, and the ability to trace a message from the 
sender's end - ie "has this message arrived?"

A feature of SMTP which is vital to keep, IMHO, is the ease of 
testing/debugging the protocol. Most people who've had to debug problems 
with protocols like POP3/SMTP/IMAP4/NNTP and also with ones like LDAP will 
be able to tell you that the text based ones are easier to handle.


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