On Wed, 27 May 1998, Al Reuben wrote:
1) Should the Internic be retaining this X Headers?
Should they? Sure, why not. :-) But they don't. However, subject lines tend to be left intact, so you can use them for tracking purposes (I built a tracking system this way, but it gets outdated every time they change the templates they send back for acks, completion messages, etc). If you're really trying to build a unified tracking system for InterNIC messages, you're going to complain about a lot of the same things I did: - Why isn't there a simple connection-oriented protocol in place for communicating this stuff instead of using email and templates? I asked this question around last August of Network Solutions, and they said "Real Soon Now". Hasn't happened yet. I've given up hope on it. - Why can't they tag their email in a machine-readable manner? Tacking on a single -reliable- header (X-InterNIC-Data: or some such) which contains machine-parsable information about the message would be a godsend for people trying to build tracking schemes like this. - Machine generated messages, for no really good reason, seem to come from semi-random addresses (faxmaster, hostmaster, domreg, etc). Why can't they pick one, for easy tagging of InterNIC machine-generated email? I could go on for hours. The email-based system could be usable, but they refuse to address a number of concerns about it that would greatly ease the development of reliable tracking mechanisms. A simple, authenticated client-server protocol for domain and contact management would be a next logical step, and their email support staff have even suggested that such a scheme was in the works, but that's never happened either. But hey, people who can reliably manage domain issues might compete with WorldNIC. We can't have that, now can we? ;-) -- -------------------. emarshal at logic.net .--------------------------------- Edward S. Marshall `-----------------------' http://www.logic.net/~emarshal/ Linux labyrinth 2.1.101 #2 SMP Sun May 10 22:34:20 GMT 1998 i586 unknown 11:15pm up 7 days, 21 min, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.04, 0.01