Re: draft-daboo-srv-email

[Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cyrus Daboo <cyrus@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I disagree. Just because clients have been forced to do things using
> guesswork up to now does not mean we should leave them and any new
> clients to do the same thing. I have heard from at least one developer
> who is working on implementing SRV support for Thunderbird.

> The SRV solution is simple to implement - most OS network libraries now
> provide simple access to SRV record results. Site and domain admins
> these days are much more comfortable with setting up SRV (required for
> services like XMPP). So I think SRV represents a simple solution that
> can be adopted in a reasonable timeframe.

I agree with Cyrus.  Even if the market has reached a workable compromise
for the time being by using well-known host names, it has done so at the
cost of flexibility which SRV records could provide.  I think it would be
very useful to document the naming conventions that will allow current
clients to find the servers, but I don't believe that's a reason to *not*
document a more robust and formal SRV record protocol as well in the hope
that clients and configurations will move to that.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>