On 6/12/2014 6:33 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 10:50 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx ... > (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. > > In a word - WebMail. This is a classic confusion between software implementation and operation, vesus networking architecture. Webmail is nothing more than a particular style of user interface, integrated into the operations of a particular service. 25-30 years ago, Einar Stefferud labeled this a "split UI" mode, since part of the mail user interface runs on the user's platform and part runs on the server's. It uses whatever homegrown UI-to-UI protocol the local operator chooses, but otherwise is nothing but classic Internet Mail architecture. It's a useful operating mode, within its limits, which typically includes requiring full-time connectivity. As good as user access to the Internet often is, requiring it all the time, for doing email, is a pretty serious limitation. More importantly, it isn't interoperable, in the sense we use the term in the IETF, since it locks the user into the service provider for literally everything. There's no user ability to have a different MUA, different email storage, different address book, different anything. By having things locked into the recipient's own email service provider, there is no way to distribute out enhancements. So, for example, there is no way for the /author/ to declare an attachment as being located somewhere else. > Updating mail clients is a long and tedious process so it is not > surprising that updates take a lot of time to percolate through. It was > 5 years after the initial deployment of MIME before mail clients to > support it became common. And the first of those that did were actually > combined mail/NNTP readers. Truly distributed networking architecture certainly does carry costs, including costs and delays of making changes. But we've had a highly siloed world before the Internet and we didn't much like sticking to it. That we've moved back to it for many services is convenient for providers to control their market (and, yes, quickly provide new features) but it has made the user's world notably more complex and often less interoperable. Consider the issue, the next time you want to send someone an instant message. Do you send it via SMS, google, facebook, yahoo, skype or -- oh yeah -- aol? That's a really prime example of the derivative effects of excessive integration witha provider: combinatorial explosion rather than seamless Internet integration. And the view that it is sufficient to have a client which integrates all the heterogeneous services into a single user interface misses the operational complexities and lack of interoperability they are living with. > I don't read all my mail in Webmail, Why not. If it's so wonderful, then why isn't it being used for all your email? d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net