--On Thursday, June 12, 2014 16:19 +0200 Dave Crocker
<dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> My point is that mail is an old protocol and people who
>> expect that it can be kept going unaltered in its original
>> form serving all the purposes that it was never designed for
>> but have emerged over time are going to be upset no matter
>> what.
>
> This is a variant of the usual refrain, over the last 20
> years, about dealing with some limitation or other to email.
> It goes along the lines of "We need to throw out SMTP and
> start over."
>
> To this and the above I have my own usual refrain:
>
> There will come a point at which SMTP (or IMAP, or the
> email object or...) do need to be replaced. An appropriate
> procedure for deciding when that point has been reached needs
> to be:
>...
FWIW, +1 to Dave's "usual refrain".
The other three things that occurred to me when reading the "old
protocol..." statement were:
(1) "kept going unaltered in its original form..." has rarely
been the expectation and, indeed, many changes have been
successfully introduced to deal with evolving needs.
(2) One of those changes --support for remote body parts-- was
incorporated into MIME in its very first version and contains
most of the mechanism needed to support what I understand PHB is
recommending for PUSH-PULL-PULL. It has been implemented in
several places but has gotten very little traction in the mail
sending and receiving community. IMO, it ought to be incumbent
on anyone proposing a different "get notification, then retrieve
mail from server" model explain why their ideas will be more
successful than that 20-odd-year-old MIME mechanism.
(3) Even though adjustments have been made to deal with changing
knowledge and needs, we have been using the old, Newtonian, view
of mechanics for circa 300 years, not merely 30 or 40. Perhaps
the argument for dumping old things because not every issue and
bit of future knowledge was originally designed into those
laws/theories should be used to dump them too. Perhaps they
should even have been dumped in the middle of the 19th century
before relativity and quantum theory came along.
Final Ultimate Solution to the [Alleged] Email Problem (FUSAEP)
anyone?
john