[EvilLook]

>What will it look like? I would guess it will look like a two-part service, with one protocol for servers to talk to each other and another for clients to talk to servers.

So SMTP and POP3/IMAP?

>Servers will send tiny notifications to other servers that mail is available for their subscribers; then the receiving servers will retrieve the mail and cache it or store it for clients. This changes the spam problem fundamentally by requiring some persistence on the part of the sending server.

So NNTP?

[pyre]

  | So SMTP and POP3/IMAP?

I think that the 'clients to talk to servers' part is referring to sending email, unless you think the webmail is the only way to send email. POP/IMAP are for reading email from the receiving server, not for sending out new emails.

  | So NNTP?

I was under the impression that most Usenet networks used UUCP.

[ethomson]

> POP/IMAP are for reading email from the receiving server, not for sending out new emails.

They probably shouldn't be, though, there's an IMAP extension for submission.

> I was under the impression that most Usenet networks used UUCP.

No, NNTP. UUCP hasn't been used seriously for over a decade.

Yours, news.ycombinator.com!ethomson

[pyre]

  | No, NNTP. UUCP hasn't been used seriously for
  | over a decade.

Looked it up and it seems you are mostly[1] right. Some time ago, I picked up the notion that most large Usenet networks synced articles between each other using UUCP, but clients used NNTP to pull down articles for reading. Not being a very avid Usenet user, I just took this at face value (also not knowing much about UUCP, like the fact that it used Layer 1 or Layer 2 protocol prior to TCP/IP).

[1] According to Wikipedia, UUCP was still in use in 2006 for at least one software product.

[claudius]

Some people apparently use UUCP-over-SSH to get mails from their remote mailservers to their local ones, because, you know, fetchmail is evil or something.

[EvilLook]

Or because it allows them to have a disconnected SMTP server that receives mail. It would be the solution that I would use if I had a multi-user mail server on a network that only occasionally dialed up to the Internet to send/receive mail but was otherwise disconnected.