Folks, >> Please indicate some historical basis for moving an installed base of >> users on this kind of scale and for this kind of reason. EAH> Notwithstanding the overly-specific nature of the request, I can think of EAH> two off the top of my head, which are FTP/Gopher->HTTP and POP->IMAP. HTTP can reasonably be considered a replacement for Anonymous FTP, during an academic discussion. The massive difference in the service experience makes this a less-than-practical comparison, when discussion an email transition. So does the massive difference in scaling issues for the 1989 timeframe, versus now. The POP->IMAP example is excellent, since it really demonstrates my point. IMAP is rather popular in some local area network environments. However it's long history has failed utterly to seriously displace POP on a global scale. EAH> Large-scale mail carriers would probably switch quickly if EAH> the accountability feature proved useful, and now we are back to hypothesizing about the behaviors of mega-corporations with massive installed bases and a rather poor history of adopting changes from the IETF community. Seriously folks, if discussion about changes is going to be productive, it needs to pay much more realistic attention to history and pragmatics of ISP operations and average-user preferences. d/ -- Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com> Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com> Sunnyvale, CA USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>