POSTEL@USC-ISIB.ARPA (09/20/85)
Mark Crispin: Mark, I think your proposal is a terrific idea! It clearly is time to move beyond the current mail procedures and modes used in the ARPA community. The goals of having machine oriented envelope and headers, and multimedia data in messages are really good ones. My thoughts on how to do it differ slightly from yours, though. I see no point in tying ourselves to the dead weight of 821/822. What we need to do is different enough that, i think, we should start with a clean slate. We should use a different protocol, a completely new server implementation, and a different contact address (e.g., TCP port). Among the difficulties in attempting to evolve into a multimedia mail system from the current 821/822 system is the issue of eight bit bytes. There are a lot of implementations out there that some how don't preserve all eight bits of the data bytes transmitted. To support multimedia in any reasonable way all eight bits have to be preserved. One of the lessons learned is that it takes a lot of energy and time to evolve a mass of existing programs from one level of functionality to another. Sometimes it is much easier to start with a clean slate. The point of compatibility with CCITT is a good one, too. In fact the X.400/MHS proposals provide a lot of what we want. It might be that the best thing to do next is to implement an X.400/MHS mail service for the ARPA community, that is implement X.400/MHS on top of TCP. Then to really push this to support all the functionality of our old 821/822 system and to try out a lot of multimedia features. Of course, there is the problem of intercommunicating between the new system and the old system. There are people trying to figure out how to transform mail between the X.400/MHS system and the 821/822 system already. I am sure some transforms can be developed and relays for such mail interoperation will appear. I am also sure that some thing will be lost in the transformation (in each direction). Also, most people like to have one mailbox, so a user of the new system will want any mail that arrives via the old system automatically converted and entered into his new-system mailbox, and vice versa. There are a few people that have been playing with multimedia mail for a few years already. It is time to put some more energy into this activity or to get some other people to do something. We should take a good look at what they have, use the good parts, fix the bad parts, make it compatible with X.400/MHS if possible, and run with it. ISI would be happy to host a meeting of interested parties to further discuss this topic and outline some plan of attack. If we do enough homework before such a meeting we might even be able to agree on a draft protocol. ISI has the right facilities to give some demonstrations of what has been done aleady in experiments with multimedia mail. I think it might be helpful to move this discussion to the MMM-People list. Anyone that wants to follow it is welcome to join. Just send your name and mailbox to MMM-PEOPLE-REQUEST@USC-ISIB.ARPA. --jon. -------
dave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (09/20/85)
While we're at it, let's do away with RFC822 rout-addr's and replace
then with something that is strictly left or right binding -- one or
the other is fine. Both is a real pain to code correctly.
--
Dave Cohrs
(608) 262-1204
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