I think the whole exercise is too limited. If we're going to really "blue sky" an idea, lets be revolutionary.
First of all, the whole concept of email is kind of obsolete. There should be a universal messaging protocol that allows, for example, me to send you a message via email, and you to receive it as a text on your phone, or however you choose to receive it. In other words, people should be able to use any messaging system they choose to send, and to receive, without regard to intermediate formats. Conversion, if necessary, would be completely invisible to the users. This universal messaging protocol should use something like XML or ASN.1 or some other more universal format. MIME is pretty much a kludge, and a pretty inefficient one at that. Binary data has to be converted via Base64 encoding or something which, if memory serves, expands it by 20% or more. (Of course, XML has this problem too, but maybe just using URIs and having the data accessed "on demand" would solve this and also reduce message size.) I note that GMail is now pre-fetching remote content, such as embedded images, and showing you copies on their servers when you read the message, rather than accessing it from its source each time. This is more efficient, and protects your identity from potential hostiles, so that seems like a pretty good model. When I was working on my own browser-based email client, the working title was AFMP, for Archive/Folder/Message/Part, the four levels of navigation which are visible to the user. In hindsight, even that seems pretty nerdy, since most users don't think of messages as having parts anyway. They think of heterogeneous "documents" with text, voice, pictures, animation, etc. Of course, I also believe the Web should do everything that Facebook does, but without the proprietary stuff, ads and privacy concerns. So take what I say with a grain of salt. -pd -- ---- Peter Davis The Tech Curmudgeon www.techcurmudgeon.com _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers