fair@apple.com (Erik E. Fair) (11/01/90)
Problem statement: we have a few UUCP neighbors who do lots of E-mail with us - in the many megabytes per day range, with the usual small average message size. This makes for a lot of UUCP transaction overhead to move the E-mail. It was exactly this sort of thing that led to netnews batching seven years ago. This is also bad for trailblazer sites - those modems do best when you give them lots of data to move, not when UUCP is negotiating over filenames. A batched E-mail transfer protocol would also allow people with trailblazer modems to make much better use of them, and their host computers. One especially promising avenue of research in this area is BSMTP (Batched SMTP), particularly because the old (bad) UUCP header hacking rules would not apply; you'd use Internet rules instead, and hide UUCP ugliness in the envelope. This would be a real boon for sites with domain names (a lot of you, these days). The BITNET uses BSMTP to good effect in parts of their network, but I've never been able to find a formal specification for BSMTP. And it's not the only thing we could do. However, as usual, I don't want to implement something if there's something already out there, so I'm looking for E-mail batching solutions that other people have implemented and are using in production. But if there isn't *anything*, I guess I'll have to implement... Thoughts? Ideas? Discussion? Post away, or E-mail me, if you feel that to be more appropriate. Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair@apple.com