Re: What real users think [was: Re: pgp signing in van]

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

>> Indeed. How one achieves such a fresh start is unclear.
>
> G+, Facebook, etc.   There's no shortage of fresh starts in the
> personal communication space.   They just don't typically look like
> typical SMTP/rfc822 email.   And of course, they substitute central
> control for a distributed key model.


Let's try to avoid that line of thinking quickly:

   1.  Starting fresh means ceasing to interoperate (well) with Internet 
Mail.  We had quite a lot of exemplars of this when the Internet was 
starting to be commercial; semantics matching was often awkward.

   2.  UI differences can be important but they do not change 
interoperable semantics (or formats).  And no matter what internal 
formats a site uses, if it is to interoperate with Internet Mail with 
high resolution in the semantics, it's conforming to rfc822/2822/5322.

   3.  There are a number of features already available in email 
standards that might be relevant to this topic, but they haven't gained 
much adoption. So they were 'thought of' and even 'made possible' but 
the market chose not to pursue them.  Encapsulating a forwarded message 
in a MIME body-part is such an example; indeed, some MUAs do provide 
that option, though users typically don't take advantage of it.

d/

ps.  All of this is no doubt entertaining, but the original comment was 
about history, not about starting fresh.  My response was posted about 
that history.

pps. An example of getting the "fresh start" idea fundamentally wrong is 
with efforts to define IPv6-based email as having different semantics 
from IPv4, rather than as the transparent extension it needs to be.

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net