Writing it down

OK, so it's been a week, and about 400 messages. Lots of good 
requirements have been suggested (and, unfortunately, lots of 
protocol designs have already been floated...). This list is clearly 
useful for generating ideas. However, the volume has proven too high 
for some people who have let me know they are unsubscribing.

To help facilitate forward motion on requirements writing, it would 
be great if multiple people would start collecting ideas for 
requirements into lists and posting those lists on web sites. If you 
are doing that, please let me know the URL that folks can use to see 
what you are doing. I'll post the URLs on the main web page for this 
list (which is <http://www.imc.org/mail-ng/>, in case you have 
forgotten it...). Your list doesn't have to be inclusive; it can 
focus on just one part of the next-generation problem.

So far, I have two listed:

<http://james.seng.cc/wiki/wiki.cgi?Mail-NG> from James Seng

<http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/user-visible-email-ng-goals.html> 
from Keith Moore

I think having another handful that grow in different ways and with 
different focuses would be good so that folks on this list can see 
where different people go when they think of "requirements".

In specific, I would love to see the lists broken down into 
mostly-separable parts of the next-generation protocol (such as 
"message transport", "message format", "message display", and so on). 
Doing so will help those who are new to designing systems from 
scratch to see that it isn't all one hunk, even though it may appear 
to be.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium