Trying to do too much (was Re: the introduction problem, etc.)

[Jim Fenton <[e-mail]>]

Reading this long thread on the introduction problem and all sorts of other things reminds me that it isn’t productive to try to solve all of email’s problems with a single protocol. Email evolved as an easy way to contact basically anyone, and as a result got used for a lot of applications with different (and even conflicting) requirements.

We should be working defining a number of protocols that handle some of the things that email is used for today, and that email doesn’t do well. Some examples might be mailing lists, newsletters, advertising, notifications, and even personal correspondence. Some of these have an introduction problem, and others are explicitly opt-in and could solve the problem at opt-in time. They might even be merged together for the user so they don’t need to look at multiple things. And yes, there would still be email to handle the “everything else” cases.

I’ve been playing around with something to handle notifications, but it’s not clear how that would achieve deployment even if it worked well. There is a definite chicken-and-egg problem here.

-Jim