| | | Compatibility and issues with SMTP |
In fact, SMTP was not designed to assure the needs of today's internet. There are some patches and extensions, so you can reasonably work around the things that were not designed into it, but that's not the point of engineering. I give you some reasons why it is necesary to substitute mailing with a new system:
Today you do not have Internet if you do not have 8Bit clean transmission. A mime encoded message is a waste of bandwidth of factor two at least. Lot's of file transmission protocols with included compresion, checksums, signing and encrypting have been developed and are well known and stable today. A new Internet Mail system will make use of this knowledge.
Traditionally we had a small amount of multiuser host with lot's of terminals and accounts. user@host was the available mailaddress namespace. Today, users either have their own host, or have on or more Email accounts on big servers, which they access from anywhere. The tight asociation of a user to a host does not exist anymore, and this is one of the main advantages spammers take to do their harm - forgery of Email addresses, either by inventing them or by pretending to be an account of another person. Directory Services like LDAP are disconecting the concept of the host and the user, we are in the `"era`" of the netcitizen.
Emails are transmitted in clear text over the wire. Anybody who can listen to the wire can read your Email too. There is the posibility to use adapted cryptographical tools to overcome this problem - pgp, for example, but they are not part of the system and there is no standard neither infrastructure to support them natively.
It is also posible to anybody to analize on the wire, who sent you how many Emails in who much time, to whom are you sending Email, etc.
Email does not have the concept of checksum or the like. What you received is what you get. There is no guarantee to receive an Email at all, there is no guarantee you receive what was ment to be sent to you. Either system failure or forgery can modify the contents of your Email.
A (provoced) failure of the Domain Name Service will allow to an intruder to "steel" all Email Messages destinated for all the user in a certain domain. The real receiver don't notice, unless they are told so.
There will be gateways which allow users with a traditional Email accounts to send mails to im2000 accounts, and vice versa.
In fact, Qim - a testbed implementation uses the standard Email infrastructure and Email clients to handle Emails and notifications.
In the future, clients will be developed, which can handle both Email standards in a seamless way for the user.
However, im2000 will not be compatible with SMTP on a protocol or server level. The Internet Service Providers will install: the mail storage server, the notification server, the collection server, and the server who anounces the users to the Internet.
All this software takes advantage of actual knowledge about
| | | Compatibility and issues with SMTP |