To: Eric Allman <eric@reference.com>
Cc: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: comments on draft-ietf-drums-smtpupd-01.txt 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 06 Dec 1995 19:27:33 MDT."
             <199512070127.TAA01212@jean-baptiste.internetMCI.ietf.org> 
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 05:45:28 +1100
Message-Id: <4598.818361928@munnari.OZ.AU>
From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>


    Every message has a size....

Yes, but clients don't need to always tell the server what that
size is, for messages less than huge, its probably better to simply
send HELO and the message, than EHLO / reject / HELO.  For huge
messages (for wahtever you definition is of huge) it may be better
to try the EHLO first, as if it works you can see if the server
will accept that size message before wasting the effort/bandwidth
of sending it.


And again, now I am reminded of size - I don't know if it is
practical, but it would be real nice to require senders not to send
messages bigger than they are prepared to receive again.

My system will happily receive huge (real huge) messages.  Other
systems use it as a relay.  Those systems sometimes send messages
that are quite large for my system to relay, which I then can't
forward as the recipient won't accept messages that large.  So far
that's all fine - my system will return the message to its origin.
Where this all breaks is where the origin also refuses to take the
message because it is too big.  Perhaps I should be trashing the
body and only returning headers, however I don't, I try to return
it all.   The result is (effectively) lost mail.
 

    I like history too, but I think the dates should at least be changed
    to use 4-digit year syntax.

I would agree with that.

kre