Re: ideas for research on wbedav required

I suspect it is hard to do a PhD on a protocol but there is a problem that
has interest me a big and I suspect that DAV might be a small part of the
answer. More and more I various communication devices - cell phones, pda,
pager, computers, IM devices. They deal with various media: short
interactive text, longer text, voice, video, smell-o-vision. And I have all
kinds of rules about who can send me messages when and how they get routed
to me. My company has rules too. I have privacy constraints. Regulatory
bodies have rules and anti privacy constraints. If I block Alice from
sending me email, I probably want to block her from IM too. It's fine to
have rules in just a single email reader but if I want the rules there to
effect all my communications, such as a phone call, I need more. How do I
mange all these rules. How do I merge these rules. How does one device
discover my rules, edit them, then upload them for all my devices. How do
privacy of sender and receiver, and preferences of sender and receiver all
get balanced. How do you make it simple enough for a single user to
understand. How can an agent that watches that I just paged Alice decide to
go and add a temporarily rule to page me if I get an email from Alice. How
can we collect enough statistics to realize that I always send phone calls
from Bob to voicemail so just send them straight there without ringing my
phone. I suspect that answering these hard questions might be able to lead
to some PhD research and it seems very likely the way to transport, edit,
and control the policy information could be DAV.

I'm cool with talk about what sort of research could be done involving
WebDav on this list, but please, please, if we are going discuss the SPAM
things, please, please move it to some other list. Anywhere but my backyard
is fine, may I suggest the DKIM mailing list. I'm sure DAV is a fine
protocol to transfer keys for DKIM, take it to the DKIM list.

Cullen (not as chair)


On 10/5/05 3:37 PM, "david muller" <david_muller_8888@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> Dear Sir,
> 
> thanks for your ideas. I had myself once vaguely
> thought of the webdav email transport protocol long
> back but could not get the clear thought that time. I
> found it quite interesting and innovative. I will
> concentrate on this idea for now and will look into
> other ideas later.
> 
> Few poins:
> 
> 1. What I could understand of the idea is "To Develop
> a Mail Transport Protocol Based on WEBDAV (i.e which
> uses the extra methods like copy, move, delete,
> profind, propatch, lock, unlock provided by webdav).
> ". The protocol should be point to point, have
> authentication, some sort of identity management.
> 
> 2. You have said that WebDAV is already the third most
> popular email transport  between mail server and mail
> client (MUA ?), since Hotmail and Outlook Express use
> WebDAV for mail transport. So does it mean that
> hotmail and outlook have already developed a transport
> protocol based on WEBDAV and are using it?
> 
> 3. Would one of the major intention behind this new
> transport protocol be to stop SPAM (you have said that
> SPAM is killing SMTP)? If yes then I really did not
> understand that why you think that point to point
> transport protocol would not have spam problem.
> 
> 
> Thanks for your time,
> Regards.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> * Email transport protocol. Spam is killing SMTP. It
>> would be nice to have a mail transport protocol that
> was > point-to-point, and involved
>> authentication or some form of expensive computation
>> for people to  
>> write email to a remote inbox. An email message is a
>> blog of content 
>> plus metadata, just like a WebDAV resource. WebDAV +
>> ACLs might be an
>> interesting starting point for creating an alternate
>> to SMTP for mail
>> transport.  WebDAV is already the third most popular
>> email transport 
>> between mail server and mail client (MUA), since
>> Hotmail and Outlook
>> Express use WebDAV for mail transport. Note that
>> this project might
>> very well also involve a solution for identity
>> management. For extra
>> credit (and a shred of hope for adoption), ensure
>> some form of  
>> interoperability with the existing SMTP-based email
>> system (perhaps 
>> by putting all of this email into an "untrusted" or
>> "unverified"  
>> folder)
> 
> 
> 
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Received on Friday, 7 October 2005 04:28:22 UTC