On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 06:18:17PM -0500, Dan Melomedman is rumored to have said: > > SMTP is just a part of the infrastructure design, but it's not robust.
I disagree. It was designed in such a way so that no message could ever be completely lost, barring a catastrophic event (disk crash, alien invasion.. ;) > Some people have recommended better designs, but nothing has been > finalized yet. See cr.yp.to/im2000.html for instance. Interesting, but I don't see how it's a better design. It might help curb the spam problem, but in no way is it robust. What it does is make e-mail slow and unreliable. Storing messages on the sender's server is (IMHO) not a good solution. For instance... Let's say that 100 people send me 100 messages (one each) in a day, and that I check my mail once per day in the evenings. That means that 100 machines have to be up *at the same instant that I check my mail*, which is the same instant that lots of other people in my time zone are checking their mail. Consider the privacy/security issues involved - there's no reason that someone who sends me mail needs to be able to learn my IP when I retrieve it. Bandwidth... With the current system, those 100 messages can trickle in throughout the day. A sending server can be having issues and be down for four hours and I'd never know it, because when it came back up, it would continue trying to send to my server until the message was received. With the IM2k system, all that mail is being retrieved from various places all over the net, all at once - along with my neighbor's mail, their neighbor's mail, etc. St- -- " The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
