On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 11:52:37AM -0600, Mate Wierdl wrote:
> I just read
>
> http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
>
> The ideas there seem extremely demoralizing for somebody trying to
> write an MTA for the traditional mail infrastructure.
I guess that depends on whether you think that im2000 is something
likely to be achieve in that year or that century... There are a
number of hurdles to surmount - in particular the issue of
notification. It strikes me that notification has the same issues that
email currently does - one party has to send something to an uncertain
address and the other party has to accept something from an uncertain
sender.
Another issue for my money is that of the lost of instantaneousness
that would result in having to (effectively) retrieve a web page for
each email you read. It sounds silly, but adding a mere second to the
time it takes to pull up an email once you've decided to read the
contents would bug a lot of people.
There is also the issue that retrieving the email may depend on
multiple network and server vageries. Having a mail "so near, yet so
far" would likewise bug me.
Even in 100 years you'll still be 100+ms and multiple routers from the
other side of the planet and what about email generated on the moon?
In short the technology is an interesting solution but I wonder
whether the cost/benefit will be as apparent to the general consumer
as the degraded user experience?
> In particular, it seems understandable why qmail-1.04 (not to mention
> qmail-2.00) has not come out. Maybe it never will---and I bet not in
> the next 6 months.
If you believe the im2000 page, why not similarly believe the "future
of qmail" page?
Regards.
