Re: Operations requirement: no hop-by-hop

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 10:54:37AM -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
> 
> This may or may not be controversial, but I propose that a 
> requirement for sane operations is that mail-ng be single hop. 
> Multi-hop was a good design 20 years ago when many entities were not 
> online all the time, but it has also proven to be a huge hurdle in 
> extending SMTP.
> 
> From an operational standpoint, a single-hop design makes many other 
> parts of the design much cleaner. It is also easier to explain to 
> users.



I'd propose to split the transport (and discussion) into two
parts: 

The traffic between different domains (or whatever we will have 
in future), and the intra-domain traffic.


For the traffic between domains, single-hop is considerable.
But for the traffic within the domain (i.e. what is 
MX to mailbox today), you can't assume every mailbox to be 
online all the time. 

regards
Hadmut