Re: draft-rfced-info-banan-00.txt

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

Steve: Please advise the RFC Editor as such.

Keith: You have copied the author on this, which I think is a Good Thing.
Would you be willing to work with the author to make the document and the
protocol something worthwhile? It looks like his company wants to make it
into a business case, so they may be willing to pay for consulting services
on protocol design.

Fred

At 03:35 PM 11/3/98 -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
>I do not consider this document fit for publication as an RFC
>in its current form.
>
>The protocol itself is poorly designed in a number of areas.
>It might be more efficient than SMTP in terms of number of
>packets and delay, but on a quick review it appears to be
>gratuitously complex, lack important functionality, and have
>insufficient error reporting and diagnostic capability.
>Its design ignores much that has been learned about email over
>the past 20 or so years.
>
>The use of ASN.1 and ESRO are highly questionable.  ONC RPC/XDR 
>and T/TCP would appear to be far better choices.  
>
>The document also contains a number of inaccurate characterizations 
>of Internet mail and SMTP.
>
>If this is indeed widely deployed, then the community might benefit
>from publication of this document as an Informational RFC, but it
>should first be edited to remove these mischaracterizations and/or
>have a strong disclaimer that recommends against actually using it.
>
>There is a real need that the protocol attempts to address, as SMTP 
>is not well suited to an environment where there is a high cost 
>associated with transmission of each IP datagram (it uses more 
>datagrams than absolutely necessary), or where there is a long 
>round-trip delay combined with low reliability (the several round
>trips required to complete an SMTP session can cause considerable 
>delay in message delivery).
>
>So we should probably consider doing a better design in IETF, but
>it should not be based on this protocol.
>
>Keith
>