Message-Id: <9511302349.AA24678@sage.Eng.Sun.COM>
To: ietf-drums <drums@cs.utk.edu>
Subject: comments on smtpupd-01.txt
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Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 15:49:22 -0800
From: "Brent B. Welch" <Brent.Welch@Eng.Sun.COM>

First - I just took a plane ride and read draft 00.
I'm taking a quick look at draft 01, but some of my comments may
have already been addressed in 01.

I agree with the general outline proposed by Paul Hoffman, but
I haven't looked at it in detail.  As someone that never read 821 before,
I agree with Pauls notion of why/how to order things.  For example, I found
the leap into a discussion about extentions and EHLO to be pre-mature.
In fact, I'd like to see a list of known extentions and references to
the RFCs that describe them.

Three paragraphs after the DISCUSSION in Section 2.1
the following statement is made.  It is backwards:
"More generally, the MAIL address is
a forward-path and the RCPT address a reverse-path."
The address in the MAIL command is the reverse-path,
and the address in the RCPT command is the forward-path.
The description is made correctly in section 4.1.1

Section 3.1 begins with somewhat vague statement:
"An SMTP session is initiated by the client opening a connection to
the server and the server responding with an opening message."
More specifically, the server listens on a specific TCP/IP port,
a client opens a TCP connection to that port,
and the server writes an opening message back to the client.
I dunno - does the use of TCP/IP go without saying?  Is the
port number specified anywhere?

The R: and S: notation in the examples is not explained.  There is a cryptic
note a bit eariler about
SMTP-Sender == client
SMTP-Receiver == server
but this should be clearer

Section 3.8 - a general comment.  There is a brief mention earlier that
relaying is a bad idea, right?  However, there is a lot of detail
in the spec about how to do it and how it affects the forward
and reverse path.
A more detailed comment:  One more sentence to explain the syntax
of the forwarding path would be nice.  All it says is
Of the form "@ONE,@TWO:JOE@THREE".  You could add something like
Colon (:) separates the final address from a forwarding path that
is a comma (,) separated list of mail server hosts.

Section 4.1.1.3, end of second paragraph, the word "user" is used
instead of "use"

The Time Stamps in the Example 10 do not follow the timezone format
urged in the text.  It is just "PDT", not "-0700 (PDT)"

Section 4.6.4.1, last paragraph of the DISCUSSION section.
"Note that an SMTP can generally determine"
seems like it should read "an SMTP client can"

Appendix B, the section about Bcc: and when to insert a Bcc:
header was confusing.  Does the recipient of a Bcc always see
the Bcc: header in the mail they get?  Or do they usually not
see themselves in the headers at all?

envelope is not in the glossary.


--	Brent Welch	Sun Labs	brent.welch@sun.com