Re: list of user-visible goals

> >> - users want to be able to use email in ad-hoc environments where no
> >> servers are available and/or make use of ad-hoc environments to
> >> expedite mail delivery (especially of large messages)
> 
> > can you clarify or elaborate?  I'm not sure what you mean by this one.
> 
> Suppose we're both at an IETF meeting or such, and you want to email me 
> the latest list of goals, which is now 25 MB. If your setup is anything 
> like mine, the message will first travel back to a place close to your 
> office, then to mine and finally back to whereever the meeting is held. 
> This is enough of an inconvenience to create some special case logic 
> that makes it possible for the file, if not the rest of the message, to 
> be delivered from your computer to mine directly.

Because we as users experience the transfer as too slow or unreliable?

> The next step would be when some people meet in a place with no 
> network, open up their laptops and create an ad-hoc network, and then 
> get to email eachother directly from one laptop to another, without any 
> help from mail- or even DNS servers.

Okay, that's a goal I can understand from a user's perspective.

> I think it would be useful to sharpen our thinking to work (for at 
> least a while) under the assumption that with mailng everything that is 
> done with SMTP, POP, IMAP and HTTP is now done using a single protocol, 
> so there is no artificial dichotomoy between servers and clients.

a) I don't know how to translate that into a user goal
b) actually I'm inclined to think we need more specialization rather
than less specialization.

--
He not busy being born, is busy dying.		- Bob Dylan