Re: list of user-visible goals

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 08:10, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> 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.

I've had some similar ideas while planning my own mail-ng system, and the 
general conclusion I reached was that we need to decouple email addresses 
from the DNS, or at least loosen the coupling.

At the moment, the "right hand side" of an email address is a DNS name, with 
DNS-based rules for resolving it to a destination mail host. This 
relationship between the right hand side and the DNS is implicit. If it were 
to be explicit instead of implicit, then other mail-address-resolving 
mechanisms could be introduced, such as may be useful for mail communication 
in an ad hoc group.

I'll attempt to express this in terms of a user want.

- In a next generation mail system, users may want to address each other in 
ways that are not possible in the existing system. The possibilities are 
limited only by imagination (and implementability), but one obvious example 
is a self-configuring ad hoc LAN (wireless, perhaps), in which the users may 
want to send messages and/or files to each other without the presence of 
traditional domain-based MTAs advertised by DNS.

Regards,
TFBW