On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Matthew Newton wrote:
>
> SMTP and mail submission are really two different things that should
> never have been merged in the first place, IMHO. :-(
I recommend listening to the LEMONADE edition of Radio Free RFC
http://podcast.resource.org/rf-rfc/#item0005
LEMONADE is about defining extensions to the email protocols to help MUAs
in challenging situations, such as low bandwidth, high latency, limited
client capacity, etc.
One of the more interesting problems they wanted to solve was forwarding
attachments etc. without downloading them to the client and uploading them
again. There was a big argument about whether this kind of message
submission should be done via IMAP or SMTP, and the answer they came up
with was "both". A pity because their solution is ridiculously
complicated, requires modification of both the IMAP server and the SMTP
server, requires teaching the SMTP server about MIME message composition
and downloading attachments via IMAP, and has a really tricky system for
communicating security credentials between the SMTP server and the IMAP
server. Absurd! It would have been much better to let the client just
speak IMAP, have the IMAP server do the message composition (it already
knows about MIME) and act as the SMTP client. No new security
relationships, no changes to the MTA.
RFC 2476 message submission was an improvement over the previous
situation; a pity that the LEMONADE people didn't take the opportunity
to fix it properly.
Tony.
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