Subject: Questionnaire about the future of e-mail

From: Jacob Palme <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 01:42:16 +0100

At the two previous IETF meetings, I distributed a questionnaire about
the future of e-mail to e-mail experts. Nine people answered the
questionnaire. The full results can be found at URL:
http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/e-mail-q-results.html

Here is a short summary of the main results:

A questionnaire was answered anonymously by 9 e-mail experts at two IETF
meetings. The questionnaire asked which features they expected will be
implemented in the next 1-4 years in e-mail software.

One can conclude that the following features will soon (in one year or
less) be implemented in those e-mail systems which do not already
support them: Commands to scan threads (find from a given message which
message it is a reply to, and which messages are replies to it), the ISO
10646 or Unicode character sets, messages in html and text/enriched
formats (allowing richer formatting and graphics in messages),
forwarding of incoming messages as separate body parts, showing separate
body parts inline and not only as attachments, sending collections of
e-mail messages as digests, security features (encryption, digital
signatures, digital seals) using PGP (but not PEM or MOSS, unfortunately
I forgot to include SMINE in the questionnaire), better support for
folders, receipt notifications (senders are told if their messages have
been read) and combined clients for e-mail and netnews.

The following features will probably be supported in 2-4 years from now:
Supersedes links between messages, alternate versions of the same text
in different formats, better search facilities and delivery
notifications (senders are told if their messages have been delivered).

Some existing mailers split paragraphs into lines before sending them,
others send each paragraph as one long line. This difference between
mailers will continue, but future mailers will better be able to cope
with incoming messages in either of these two formats. (My guess is that
sending paragraphs as one long line will ultimately win, since the main
reason against it is that some mailers cannot handle incoming such
messages very good today. It has the obvious advantage that the ugly
effect of lines being split more than once will disappear.)

It is interesting to note that even though delivery notifications have
had an IETF standard since the beginning of 1996, while the receipt
notification standard will be ready in the end of 1997, implementors say
they will implement support for receipt notifications earlier than for
delivery notifications. The reason for this is that many existing
mailers already support receipt notifications in non-standard ways (only
between mailers of the same type). Some did maybe answer the
questionnaire by describing non-standard and not standard receipt
notification support.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <[email-masked]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme