Re: list of user-visible goals

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 12:17:26PM +1100, Brett Watson wrote:
> 
> 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.
>

This beast was already invented. Use Unified Resource Identifiers
instead of old fashioned mail addresses, so you can choose which 
kind of addressing is used, e.g.  smtp:someone@somewhere could be an 
old-fashioned e-mail address. 

I'd propose to not only cover SMTP with a new protocol, but also 
NNTP. Posting to a newsgroup is very close to sending an e-mail,
except for the differen addressing scheme and the transport mechanism 
itself. If you are wanting to losen things from the plain addressing 
scheme, half of the thing is already done.

Best thing would be to find something which covers both newsgroups and
mailing lists. After all, there is not too much difference between 
a list of newsgroups and a list of mailing lists like those at
imc.org. The main difference is whether it is open or closed, 
and whether contents are broadcasted or routed. 

Any really new mail system should be able to cover both.

(And as I learned from the RMX discussion, mailing list processing
and mail forwarding is a chaos, every software author has his
personal flavour how to do it, since there is no defined standard.
When covering mailing lists and addressing, this should also be
specified.)

Hadmut