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wow, how to romanticize X.400 ... - poor Internet fit, assuming managed, trusted networks - some promises depended on all participating systems behaving honest
by thund 5mo ago
wow, how to romanticize X.400 ...
- poor Internet fit, assuming managed, trusted networks - some promises depended on all participating systems behaving honestly
- once a message reaches another server, you cannot guarantee it isn't copied, backed up, or logged
- X.400 read receipts: more reliable but also more privacy invasive
- X.400 metadata: carries a lot of routing, classification, and organizational info leading to potential privacy leaks
- SMTP is ugly but observable, you don't need a standard specialist to debug issues
- grandinj 5mo agoYeah, as someone who had to implement a protocol stack to talk to a X.400 server, it was not fun at all. Weird encodings, monster spec, all sorts of weird server-specific stuff that you had to do exactly right if you wanted the server to accept your email. Compared to that, when I implemented RFC821/822 (i.e. SMTP) mail, the hardest part was the weird line-encodings, but other than that, the spec was ___so___ nicely readable and pragmatic.
- bigfatkitten 5mo agoFor the use cases where it found adoption, such as in air traffic management, formal military messaging, diplomatic cables etc, these are all mostly desirable properties.