Subject: Re: [lemonade] Time to Stand up and be counted

From: Randall Gellens <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 19:18:51 -0800

Even though we are only solving the forward without download problem, 
I think we need to think about the impact of the changes we consider.

Adding message submission to IMAP has a risk of creating two 
divergent submission mechanisms, one for IMAP clients and one for 
everyone else (including POP clients, scripts, etc.)  Every Submit 
extension would need to be replicated as an IMAP extension, and many 
submission-related IMAP extensions would need to be replicated in 
Submit.  In my detailed IMAP Submit proposal I tried to avoid this by 
explicitly using Annotate as a pass-through mechanism for Submit 
extensions, thus allowing the use of arbitrary Submit extensions 
without the IMAP server needing to be explicitly aware of them.  This 
does add extra complexity to the protocol, but the alternative would 
be far worse long-term.

Even with this protection mechanism, I worry that Push would be a 
short-term kludge that seemed easier at the time, but would lead to 
long-term pain.  I've seen the ill effects of layer and functional 
separation violations, and they can take many years to fix.

The Pull model seems to me to be a cleaner approach, one in keeping 
with the decision to split SMTP relay from message submission, and 
less likely to have ill effects if or when extended in the future.
-- 
Randall Gellens
Opinions are personal;    facts are suspect;    I speak for myself only
-------------- Randomly-selected tag: ---------------
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves
and how little we think of the other person.           --Mark Twain

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