>> This draft also defines the MT-Priority header field. �It is quite unusual >> for a SMTP extension specification to define a mail header field. ... >This is my major concern about this protocol as well, as I note in the >PROTO writeup (which, unfortunately, can't be seen publicly because of >a limitation in the datatracker; perhaps I should post it here). I'm >interested in hearing whether others share this concern, and what the >community consensus is about it. I have no problem logging stuff from the SMTP session into a message header, we've been doing that since forever. But I have a lot of problem turning a header back into SMTP for a subsequent relay, for two reasons. One is just that it's ugly. There were good reasons to separate the envelope from the body back in the 1970s, and I think those reasons are just as good now. Over in the EAI group, there was a valiant effort to tunnel EAI messages through non-EAI SMTP servers via downgrades, and we eventually gave up. Now, if you want to send an EAI message, there has to be an EAI path all the way from the sender to the recipient. This isn't exactly analogous, but it's instructive. The other reason is that I think it's too ill-specified to interoperate. The theory seems to be that the relay server notices an MT-Priority: header, and (vigorous waving of hands) somehow decides if the message has sufficient virtue to promote the header back into the SMTP session. The hand-waving is not persuasive; the suggestion of S/MIME, which obviously won't work, is not encouraging. If you want to brave the ugliness and standardize this, the spec needs to explain how the server decides whether to believe an MT-Priority header. If it doesn't, it's too vague to interoperate. So I have two suggestions. One is to leave it as is, and make it experimental. If it turns out the tunnels all work the same way, you can come back and add the spec about how they work and rev it as standards track. The other is to take out the tunnel bit and make it standards track now, so a compliant implementation needs priority-aware MTAs from end to end. Even if you take out the tunnel stuff in the spec, you can still tunnel in your implementations, using whatever non-standard ad hoc kludges you want. Since the current spec has gaps that would need to be filled by non-standard ad hoc kludges anyway, you haven't lost anything. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
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