MBOX-Line: From brong at fastmail.fm  Wed Mar 19 03:52:31 2014
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:52 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] STARTTLS after PREAUTH
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LSU.2.00.1403191013240.31260@hermes-1.csi.cam.ac.uk>
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On Wed, Mar 19, 2014, at 09:21 PM, Tony Finch wrote:
> Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> >
> > You see it all the time in standards with low and poor adoption.  Optimising
> > for the edge cases.  Case in point the argument against SUBMIT via IMAP and
> > POP - instead needing a separate authenticated connection for SMTP so that it
> > can support all the future extensions which might be added to SMTP.
> 
> Indeed. Particularly annoying.
> 
> Aside from the operational problems you listed, there is an architectural
> problem with ESMTP for message submission: the IETF refused to describe a
> way to represent envelope extensions in RFC 822 message headers, which
> means MUAs have to invent their own non-standard ways to represent this
> information in draft messages and saved copies of sent messages.
> 
> A sensible design would be like BCC: where the submission process
> constructs the envelope based on information in the message header and
> strips any extraneous headers. If you do that then draft and saved
> messages can use a standard format and you can trivially put the
> submission process into the IMAP server.
> 
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg11566.html

I've signed up to that list now.

I've argued about the SUBMIT via IMAP issues before, and every time I've
been shot down by the "it's not future-proof", and even more clear "we've
chosen another way to do that, and we're not going to rehash the arguments
we made at the time, go read the archives to see why you're wrong and also
stupid".

It kind of turned me off the whole standards world for a while, because for
every excellent thing like CONDSTORE you get a whole ton of architecture
astronaut solutions like BURL.

But standards are the only way to make things useful for more than your own
little walled garden, so there's really no choice.  I don't want to
improve one little walled garden.

Bron.

-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  brong@fastmail.fm

