Re: Operations requirement: no hop-by-hop

At 7:54 PM +0100 2/15/04, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>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.

Correct.

>  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.

Then we disagree about requirements here. I think others have said it 
well: if a sender wants to ignore a recipient's desires, the sender 
will do so regardless of the protocol. The operational requirement is 
simplicity and predictability for operators. Adding overhead that 
pretends that aggressive senders will follow recipient's desires has 
proven to be a bad design choice for almost ten years now.

BTW, I'm not against having a way for a good sender to request 
permission from a recipient: in fact, that is a fine requirement. But 
that can be done in a different control plane than message 
transmission.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium