Re: Why are we here? What are our goals?

On 1-feb-04, at 9:22, 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.

Ok. The main thing that I desire from a new mail system is more control 
over the mail I receive, and better feedback over what I send. Because 
I run a business, I need to be able to receive mail from people I don't 
know. However, I want to be sure it's actual _people_ sending me 
messages and not robots programmed to abuse the mail system. I now have 
decent anti-spam software, but the trouble is that I still have to go 
through all rejected messages to see whether there are any false 
positives. What I want is that a message that my system labels as spam 
receives a reply that my software thinks this is spam and please try 
again. What I DON'T want is to receive bounces for all those messages 
that are really spam and used a fake return address.

Another important feature would be smarter routing of large messages. 
It seems pretty silly to me that when I'm sending a message to someone 
sitting next to me at some conference, the message often travels 
halfway around the world.

> For example, we want users to be able to exchange email in their
> native language.

I think most of them already do that...

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

This is very dangerous anyone having a non-latin email address can't 
expect to receive mail from people who don't master this character set. 
So someone who speeks a non-latin language as well as a latin one, 
would always have to provide two representations of his/her email 
address in order to be reachable in both languages.