Re: [Jmap] Submission

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <[e-mail]>]

Ted Lemon writes:
> I think the distinction comes from whether you actually think 
> that the SMTP submission protocol is always going to be what's 
> behind a message submitted via JMAP.   If you think that, then 
> it's going to look really weird to not just replicate that exact 
> paradigm with the JMAP submission process.

Hm?

Won't the nexthop generally be the thing that the port-587 server forwards 
to? After all, JMAP already handles authentication, and it's not clear to 
me that a typical JMAP server is easily able to authenticate on behalf of 
the end user in a way that a port-587 server accepts.

Assuming that JMAP forwards to the filter or smarthost, then requiring that 
JMAP servers be able to forward SMTP extensions looks really odd. A 
submission server on port 587 cannot forward SMTP extensions from its 
nexthop, why should one on port 443 have to?

The usual answer is "so as to not need a corresponding JMAP RFC whenever 
there's a new SMTP RFC". That strikes me as poor. A new extension requires 
an RFC and three kinds of implementations (SMTP client, submission server, 
filter server). The RFC publication bit isn't usually the bottleneck among 
those four.

> The point is that whichever choice we make, we are going to pay 
> a price for it.   It's worth asking what that price is, and also 
> asking what the advantages are to the choices we have, and then 
> deciding on that basis.   The fact that we would pay a price for 
> not replicating SMTP submission can definitely be taken as a 
> given.

+1

Arnt