Generalities

Generalities

Posting a message is described in Posting. In short, a Mail is composed of one or more messages or message pointers, where a message is a binary stream (a single file) with attributes like recipients, sender, etc. and a pointer is a special messages which asigns its recipients access rights to a message the sender has received.

A mail is asociated with a Message Thread Identifier, as are all of its messages, which in turn have Message Identifiers.

There can be more than one Mails be asociated to a Message Thread Identifier.

Posting is considered a low-level process, which manages to store the individual parts of a Mail in an "outgoing queue", or better on a Mail storage server, and tells the server to notify the recipients of new mail.

Mailing is the process, which aliviates a uses of knowing the details of posting. A Mailer (MUA) allows a user to specify the recipients of a Mail and its parts (compose a message), and then uses the low-level posting process to convert this specification into a valid part of a Message Thread - a sent Mail.

Posting in Qim2000 defines "X-im2000-recipient-identifier:" as a new field in the header of a traditional Email message. This field conveys the Recipient of the Message. A message is posted by sending an Email to the local address "im2000-am-sequence" with the Message Thread Id in the Subject, the Recipient Identifier in X-im2000-recipient-identifier: and the message in the Body of they message. sequence is a monotonic serial number of messages which "hold together" and "order" individual messages in a thread.

Notes:

 

• As of time of this writing, it is not clear, if a Message may only contain on X-im2000-recipient-identifier: or as many as necesary to spread a Mail to various recipients, and if the field may contain more than one recipient identifier. The Mailer can easily create various messages, each with a diferent recipient. Space is of no concern, as only one copy of the message has to be stored, the others may be symbolic or hard links to it.

  Privacy increases, as it is not posible to deduce other recipients of a message when receiving a notification.

  The actual implementation only deals with one recipient identifier, and one field.

• The actual implementation also does not deal with multipart messages. It would be posible to parse a multipart Email and split it into individual messages, for example with maildrop's reformime, but in the actuality the Mail body is left alone and it's the receivers responsibility to deal with its contents.

Generalities