--On Monday, March 30, 2009 7:52 PM +0100 Rik <hlug090...@buzzhost.co.uk>
wrote:
The MAIL RFC's were conceives a long time ago and have had some changes.
Sure - the mail system is not ideal - however, with no RFC's we would
end up with closed, stupid proprietary systems that don't talk.
Microsoft Exchange is one reason why RFC's are important :-)
While standards are useful, broken standards only encourage the development
of closed systems (like Exchange) that aren't beholden to the status quo
and have more freedom to enforce internal consistency. (Whether that is
done is impossible to tell from outside, of course. Another benefit of
standards, unrealized in the mail case, is that one can tell by inspection
if an instantiation of the standardized item complies.)
With some other RFCs and other standards, there are reference
implementations that can be used to test the standard itself. For example,
ISC has written reference implementations for DNS and DHCP. Open Office can
be used as a reference implementation for its document formats. What's the
reference implementation for email message formats? AFAIK there is none.
(I'd guess sendmail could be used to test SMTP compliance?)
