Re: header-munging

[Tim Goodwin <[e-mail]>]

> It is far too late to argue that SMTP should not be used for submission.

Agreeed.

> All we can do, as I see it, is either (a) accept the status quo and do
> nothing, or (b) try and improve the situation in an efficient way.

I agree, and I agree that we should strive for (b).

Unfortunately, I really, really, can't see the SUBMIT extension helping.
It's just way too complicated for the client.  Nobody's going to
implement it.

I suppose, maybe, if you're a client that already does ESMTP but submits
broken messages, there might be some point in using SUBMIT.  Such
clients are currently a tiny minority.  For other clients, it would be
simpler to generate conforming RFC 822 messages in the first place.

If we truly hope to overcome the inertia of the status quo, we need
something that's trivial to implement on the client side (and preferably
the server side, too, although that's slightly less important).  The
only suggestion I've seen which I think fits the bill is to use SMTP but
on a different port.

I've written this idea up in internet draft form.  I haven't yet
submitted it, but you can retrieve it from

    ftp://ftp.pipex.net/pub/mail/draft-goodwin-smtp-submit-00.txt

Please let me have any comments.

Thanks,

Tim.