E-mail vs. FTP -- RTF RFC

Sat May 26 14:56:36 UTC 2001

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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Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 +0000 (GMT)
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E-mail vs. FTP -- ***RTF RFC***

E-mail vs. FTP -- RTF RFC