On Oct 14, 2019, at 3:04 PM, Keith Medcalf <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Monday, 14 October, 2019 14:18, Warren Young <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Fossil Forums allow you to subscribe to email notifications. From the
>> reader’s perspective, it’s really very little different from the current
>> Mailman based scheme.
>
> The preceding paragraph is completely at odds with the following paragraph,
> and taken together, they are completely illogical and inconsistent.
You’re conflating inbound and outbound paths. The ability to send email
implies but does not require the ability to receive email.
...Which is why they’re often entirely different stacks, speaking different
protocols! E.g. SMTP outbound via Postfix, IMAP inbound via Dovecot.
> All it needs is to be able to "read and process" RFC-2822 formatted message
> files that are found in an "inbound for me” directory
That’s certainly one way that some email servers work. The most common such
scheme is called Maildir.
But there’s probably at least half a dozen other ways it can work: mbox, MySQL
store, PostgreSQL store, whatever it is that MS Exchange does that’s
incompatible with the rest of the world…
There are currently four supported outbound email setups in Fossil, and a stub
for a fifth:
https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/alerts.md#advanced
Why would inbound be different?
Fossil isn’t in a position where it can require a specific SMTP server. It has
to run on pretty much every common desktop and server platform. You have to
get pretty far down the long tail of OSes before you find one that Fossil
doesn’t get used on daily by someone. Therefore, we have to support
approximately everything.
On top of integrating with all common SMTP stacks, drh long ago stated a wish
to write his own SMTP server. (The latter being why Fossil has the start of
one included!) This should not surprise you if you’ve followed his career. :)
The last time I counted up the pages of RFCs you have to implement to speak to
a large fraction of the Internet email infrastructure — which was one of the
times this argument came up on this mailing list! — it was something like 500
pages of standardese. It is not just RFC-2822. Getting to something useful
will take time, which comes out of the time budget for SQLite, Fossil, etc.
There is the option of writing glue software between Fossil and whatever SMTP
infrastructure you already have, but no one’s bothered to do that in the year
or so that Fossil Forums have been in steady use. To me, that speaks more of
the desirability of inbound email submission than about its inherent difficulty.
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