Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question

[Erik Skovgaard <[e-mail]>]

Peace!

It was not my intent to belittle your effort.  I know it must have taken
some considerable number of long nights.  Nor was it my intent to take
cheap shots at PP.

As I recall, my message was sent in response to a shot at X.400 and it
looked to me as if the author's reference point was PP.

As you point out, there are two "versions" of PP: the public and the
commercial one.  Surely, the commercial version has been enhanced?

Most of the current commercial versions are based on many ye{ars of
development and in the range of $2-10M of development cost.  You may
argue that some of this effort may not be optimal in terms of the
productivity of the developers, but I still suggest (hopefully without
offending anybody) that some of these commercial implementations may
be a little more mature then the public {version of PP.{

Again, my intent was not to criticize PP, merely to put things in proper
perspective.  Comparing RFC-822 mailers that have been around for a
long time with a relatively new piece of code strikes me as unreasonable
and then on top of that judge a set of international standards based
on one product was what got me going.

Now to your specific questions.

I know how expensive it is to conformance test.  And your estimate
does not even include the engineering effort (particularly the first
time!), and, no, I do not expect this for public code (but then, of
course, we compare apples and oranges).  But I do expect code that has
passed conformance test to be more stable and well-behaved.

You are pointing out a sad truth:  most of the service providers (ADMDs)
are not 100% conformant.  Alas, X.400 does not work if you break the rules.

For the hardware you mention I would expect a throughput of 5-10,000
messages per hour or better.  I often use a message size of 1K since
this used to be an industry average (actually, it used to be 800 bytes),
but these days when people send binary files this may not be a good
test anymore.

Cheers,                      ....Erik.