Re: Operations requirement: no hop-by-hop

At 9:45 PM +0100 2/15/04, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>What we desperately need is a mechanism that makes it possible for 
>the sender and the recipient to interact in a sane and automatic way.

We fully agree. Why do you feel that there is only one way to meet 
this requirement?

>>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.
>
>That's because they have a choice today: they can ignore the 
>recipient's wishes and the message is delivered. That's plain stupid.

Trying to get back to making this a requirements discussion, you are 
saying that it is a requirement that the transport mechanism validate 
policy before delivery. I am saying that is not a requirement, that 
the real requirement is that "the sender and the recipient to 
interact in a sane and automatic way", and further that the result of 
that interaction be passed to agents for each of them.

>>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.
>
>I don't want to have messages transmitted to me that I know I don't 
>want to see. Especially when they're big.

Of course. The cost is that you will refuse some messages that you 
might have actually wanted (because the sender didn't describe what 
they were doing correctly or you misjudged their request) and that 
the infrastructure has to be developed to help you assert that 
policy. Further, the infrastructure that you require is much more 
prone to silently dropping mail than today's is.

The Internet works best when policy is only at, or very close to, the 
edges. If you disagree with that (and you very well might), your 
requirements are different than the ones I am describing.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium