Willie, > In my limited understand, SMTP is a store-and-forward protocol. Will > this affect your proposal? I imagine it would not be pleasing to > click on something you expect to be interactive and have it respond 4 > hours later. Maybe I should go read your draft more thoroughly -- > you probably already thought of this.
It is certainly possible an interactive reply from a distant mail server could take 4 hours so liberal a time to live were allowed. I don't see that as being common, however. I want to say that 10 - 15 years ago something like this would have been more than the norm than the exception. Today, however, many servers on the application layer of the transmission stack, whether they be web, email, or other, typically sit on high bandwidth networks connected to other high bandwidth network. In my case specifically I am currently in Afghanistan, which is perhaps an isolated communication point for communications that live mostly in the United States. Dispite the probably delays associated with my isolation and distance my response to and from other email servers appears instantaneous. If I misstype the user name portion of an email address and send the email I will have a reply from the distant server about no such address almost instantly. This is dispite being limited to a 128kbit connection. If in my extreme condition bandwidth is not an issue then I fail to see how such an issue could be common enough to provide any real service problems. Further to the point the dynamic responses detailed in the specification would represent fragments of a document and not a full communication, so large amounts of bandwidth would only be consumed at the initiation and not in the interaction. This should be equivocal to the bandwidth demands of a XMLHttpResponse on the web. Does this answer your question? Thanks, Austin
