[37982] in North American Network Operators' Group
E-mail vs. FTP -- ***RTF RFC***
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (E.B. Dreger)
Sat May 26 11:24:05 2001
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 14:56:36 +0000 (GMT)
From: "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0105261436520.13047-100000@www.everquick.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Greetings all,
Section 7.3.3 of RFC1341 addresses the external storage, expiry, et cetera
issues. Not perfect, but a good first pass... and almost ten years old,
too.
((( Thanks to Valdis for pointing this out! )))
We could probably kludge FTP as an interim measure:
* MTA intercepts attachments, and spools them separately.
* "access-type: ftp" with, e.g., username "msg12345recipient67890" and
password "mi93et490" and "expiration: Mon, 28 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000".
The specific parameters would be generated on a per-message basis.
* Mail admins can enforce quotas. Nothing new. The arguments in favor of
electronic transfer are on the grounds of timely communication. One
could argue that somebody not checking mail for a week doesn't deserve
to receive their attachment without a second "transmission". The proxy
MTA could insert a human-readable expiration notice or whatever other
user-friendly prompting is deemed to be a good idea.
* We could also forget the MIME method, and put in a human-readable link
to get the attachment, a la electronic greeting cards. This would allow
immediate use of non-registered access-type methods.
Eventually, I'd like to see this done via HTTP/1.1 using chunked
transfers. However, no current MUAs will support a non-existant HTTP
method or any X-Experimental methods. For something that would work
*right now*, I think that RTF RFC and going from there is the right way...
Does anybody know what MUAs follow the RFC for external message content?
A little smtpd and ftpd hacking could yield something workable PDQ.
Eddy
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