Uphill battle

Improving Unix Mail Storage? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Let's think of all the enhancements to existing protocols and how well they have done:

• IPv.6
  
• HTTP/1.1 (ok, this did pretty well...eventually)
  
• SNMP v.2
  

Granted the poster is asking about mail storage, but the question goes way past that into how the protocol functions itself. This is a huge problem. The existing user base out there pretty much works with what is there.

Is this an excuse for staying with what we have and never gettingg anything better. Kinda. Whatever it is you come up with better be backwards compatible and easy to implement or it won't go anywhere.

In the posts there was even mention of Exchange from MS, since it seemed to have a lot of features that people were looking for, like single instance storage of messages and attachments. Of course, it has drawbacks.

I guess my point is that you can't just dictate that something will change. Dan Bernstein thought he could do this with SMTP and DNS. It hasn't worked. Sure, a few people are running djbdns and it suits them fine.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all it takes is one person to make a change and then have the rest of the world follow. It just seems like a "boil the ocean" type problem.