Email and other adventures...

I find the whole conversation about email rather interesting. I've separated
out the issue of email (and its uses) from the ability to deliver
attachments. In the system I'm building I've decided to focus on the essence
of email, which I view as the need to inform others about some
issue/event/etc. I've thrown away the idea of sending attachments (or even
the idea of MIME) in favor of sending URLs.

It seems to me the whole reason for sending attachments was that email
clients were mostly disconnected (and only occassionally) connected to the
net. And to make the use of those attachments useful, MIME was invented. I
decided that my client message (which uses a very simple XML DTD) only
needed to include URLs. If I needed to communicate with someone via
conventional email (rather than my specialized reader), the client would
talk to an SMTP proxy that could take the XML-ized email and constitute a
real (multi-part) MIME email messge. The idea I had (and am implementing) is
to assume that I have some type of FTP or HTTP server (WebDav anyone)
capable of serving up the content of the attachments.

If implemented parts of it (using libwww and libxml) and it seems to work.
Is this too simplified an idea?

Chuck Wegrzyn

Received on Monday, 2 October 2000 17:15:55 UTC