Subject: Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:41:55 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

> ...
> > Other than latency, message size, message rate, and the number of
> > participants, what is the difference between an AOL chat room and this
> > mailing list as exemplified by this thread?
>
> why, the participants, of course.
>
> once people move into chat rooms and make acquaintances there, they
> become reluctant to leave.  if changing service providers means they 
> must leave, they're less likely to change service providers even
> though they get lousy service.

It sounded as if you were making the standard swipe at people who use
AOL.  If you had been, my rejoinder would have been to quote the first
vacation message I got in response to my note.

However, I've suddenly realized that the fault for some of the vacation
messages rests with the people running this list.  Notice that they
are not including a "Precedence: bulk" or "Precedence: bulk" lines
which tell at least some `vacation` programs to do the obvious.  They
do include "X-Loop: [email-masked]"

In other words, the IETF itself is not above some standads bending..

> ...
> still, my point was that the AOL community is more-or-less disjoint
> from the community of folks who read IETF documents, and is likely
> to remain so.  that's not necessarily a bad thing overall, but it
> does imply that IETF will have little effect on the decision-making
> habits of AOL subscribers.  

yes.

>                             if AOL subscribers cared about standards
> compliance they would have left AOL long ago.

You're wrong about that.  Remember when AOL didn't have anything to do
with the Internet?  That the standards for some of the services that AOL
sells are written and published by AOL instead of the IETF, ITU, ANSI, or
IEEE doesn't make them any less interesting to those buying those services.
In other words, if the IETF were to suddenly and not upwardly compatibly
change the spelling of "Rctp To" in "To Rcpt" in SMTP and if AOL were to
make a similar change in their services, which change would generate more
enraged phone calls?

Note that I think AOL ought to be sued for false advertising because
of the SMTP redirection proxies it interposes in the services that it
does claim have something to do with the Internet.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 13:12:23 -0400

> which tell at least some `vacation` programs to do the obvious.  

nor should they.  Precedence is not a standard header field, and it's
used in so many different ways by different pieces of software
(to do everything from setting queueing priority to telling peered
mailing lists not to forward the message) that it's better to omit it.

> In other words, the IETF itself is not above some standads bending..

what standard are you referring to?

Keith

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 13:16:42 -0400

> IEEE doesn't make them any less interesting to those buying those services.

nothing that AOL does on its own is standard.  to use the term "standard"
in that way is to make the term meaningless.

the people who I'm receiving mail from are not complaining about AOL not 
following its own "standards"; they're complaining about AOL's failure
to interoperate with Internet Mail.  and rightfully so.

> does claim have something to do with the Internet.

that's just one item in a long list.

Keith