Subj : TITHmailer
To   : Deuce
From : deon
Date : Tue Nov 18 2025 09:26:37

  Re: TITHmailer
  By: Deuce to deon on Mon Nov 17 2025 02:49 pm

Howdy,

 > Yeah, a lot of where FTN ended up is just inertia.  There's various
 > proposals from the 80s and 90s rotting away suggesting similar things, but
 > they never caught on in FidoNet, so most of them are half-baked at best.

I agree. Language is also an issue there, where content is written in english that is too generic, open for multiple interpretations of the actual intent.

I too thought about written my version of those specs - but glad to see that you've started that bandwagon :)

 > It's been an interesting journey even for just the small bit I've done so
 > far, realizing that the point I was starting at wasn't quite right... pretty
 > sure the first thing I'll be creating now will be the bundler, which will be
 > the thing that implements the Binkley-style outbound, then the unbundler,
 > which will implement the inbound, THEN the mailer.

Nice. I was going to work on the mail bundling first (since I noticed your specs starting to define that).

 > The assumption of default direct has some interesting implications for
 > echomail that I'm still working through, it still keeps collapsing into a
 > simple star topology, which means the SEEN-BY for pretty much every post
 > will either be only two nodes, or a copy of the whole nodelist.  It feels
 > like just a usable PATH will do the job, and a robust MSGID will allow loops
 > to be detected and mitigated/fixed.

It might be worth considering multiple star topologies? IE: Distributed, otherwise the network falls apart when the 1 hub at the center of the star topology goes AWOL (which happens too often in othernets)...

But agree, a MSGID should be the definitive determination of duplicate content, and it might be a dynamic value being the "sender's ID" and a "timestamp". There might also need to be a "context" element to to avoid the situation that two users (in two different msg areas), post a message at the exact same "timestamp".

If a message has a digital signature added to it (as a kludge so its not displayed for example), then the origin line could be completly dynamic and cosmetic.

Anyway just spit balling ideas without really thinking them through...


....лоеп

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