On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote: > > For example every ISP has to spend time and money helping their > customers to configure their email clients to locate their POP3, IMAP > and SUBMIT servers. > > Those costs could be eliminated if email clients looked at the relevant > SRV records rather than requiring the user to become an administrator > and enter this data. A matter that is close to my heart :-) Why did this draft not get any further? http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-hall-email-srv-02.txt Looking back at something I wrote a year ago, I said that SRV records don't provide higher-level settings, such as security requirements. The email configuration problem is much more than just typing in the right host names and port numbers: MUAs are generally dreadful at configuring themselves securely using the in-band capabilities listed by the servers. (e.g. whether to use TLS, what SASL mechanism to use, etc.) without detailed hand-holding from the user. In fact it would be pretty simple for an MUA to configure itself given just an email address and some intelligent guesses, falling back to asking the user for more information if the guesses fail. The intelligent guesses are just based on informal host naming conventions (i.e. imap.domain, smtp.domain, etc.) and standard port numbers, which together make SRV redundant. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch <dot@xxxxxxxx> http://dotat.at/ SOUTHEAST ICELAND: EAST OR NORTHEAST 6 TO GALE 8, OCCASIONALLY SEVERE GALE 9. ROUGH OR VERY ROUGH, BECOMING HIGH. RAIN OR SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf