On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 01:59:35AM -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote: > SMTP is designed for one-to-one communication. It works well for that. > But its unsuitability for many-to-many should be clear by now. SMTP works just as well for one-to-many, depending on where those many are. Bob made changes that make this less efficient in exchange for better bounce handling, that's a tradeoff he was willing to make. > RSS is pull. Guess what, IMAP and POP are pull. Unless you're hosting > SMTP on your laptop, you're using pull! Yeah, and guess what. RSS feeds are hammered by idiots setting their refresh rate to 1 minute, pop and imap servers are hammered by idiots setting their 'check for new mail' to once a minute, while my SMTP server handles itself just fine pushing mail around as it sees fit. Ever run a popular RSS feed or mail server? Gaming companies (such as Sierra/Valve) now use content distribution systems to update customers games, the servers notify the clients that there are updates available, then they push the updates to the clients. This resolves the millions of idiots repeatedly checking for updates problem. (Or 'millions of idiots trying to download the same file from the same web server' problem) It works a lot better because the updates are pushed to all the clients and they're scheduled to update on a certain date, you get a lead time to spread out the resource usage and a date on which everyone is running the new version (for game server compatibility) > I'm saying rather than having all the ugly hackishness of a list server > trying to push duplicate messages all over a thousand SMTP servers, > bouncing all the while, cut out the middle man. Have the client pull > directly from the server. As far as the client is concerned, its pulling > either way. It's infinitely more wasteful to pull than to push. "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" "Mommy, are we there yet?" vs. "Kids, we've arrived." -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203