Re: Operations requirement: no hop-by-hop

On 15-feb-04, at 18:06, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:

> The mail-ng transport protocol should be designed to only know about a 
> single hop, from sender to recipient. The sender may have multiple 
> hops to a designated transport agent, and the receiving transport 
> agent may have multiple hops to a mailstore, but the transport 
> protocol should not make any accommodation for these additional hops 
> other than to allow them to add metadata to the transit stream. These 
> requirements are to make the protocol more sensible and to limit the 
> responsibility of operators to just what they control.

I'm not exactly sure what it is that you want to prevent from happening 
here.

To me, this reads as though you want every mail transport session to 
live in its own universe without regard to what's happening elsewhere. 
If this is correct, I must object as this is exactly where much of the 
current insanity comes from. What we need is a way to get the sender to 
behave according to the recipients wishes, which makes it necessary to 
add more feedback to the new protocol, even if this spans across 
servers and sessions.