Re: Mail Path MTU discovery?

On Sun, Feb 15, 2004 at 10:32:13AM +0100, Jochen Topf wrote:
> For instance the "spool size" limit might be obsolete if we can deliver
> certain mails directly into the mailbox without them ever beeing in the
> spool. I know of no mail system who can do this today, but that doesn't
> mean that it's not possible.

Not all mailboxes are online all day. And this will not change in 
near future. You'll also need forwarding, mailing list distribution 
etc. So I guess spooling and relaying will be necessary, otherwise
it would not be a mail system anymore.


I'm pretty sure that we need to focus on congestion and how
to avoid it. Mail traffic will certainly increase significantly.

And as a requirement, I personally do not wish everyone on the
world to be able to push Gigabytes into my mailbox. Abusively
sending large messages is a kind of attack, and a new protocol
should be abusive against this kind of attack.

So I'd be happy if there could be any kind of maximum size 
negotiation instead of a fixed size limit and - as stated before
and already described in an older RFC - a way to replace
large attachments with just a handle to pull them later.


I would appreciate it if I had a mechanism to e.g.  limit the
message size for messages from any people I've never seen before
to e.g. 50 KByte. If I have seen them before, then maybe
500KByte, and for good friends 20MByte. 

(An application for mail cookies?)


regards
Hadmut