I like the idea of using email. Occasionally, though, an alternate transport layer will be necessary, and I'd hope that the endpoints wouldn't have to know too much about it.

Based on the email I've gotten, it looks like lots of people have tried to solve this. Would anybody be interested in an informal working group? Let me know, if so. If nothing else, I'd appreciate some review of my draft specification.

i dunno about a working group, but i have done something with this before in a production environment. i had to set up a firm-wide data collection mechanism (for a really large international company), stuff the data in a database, and generate reports three times a day from it (for tokyo, london, and new york offices). a few people whined about email ("it's not a production system"), but it worked just fine. and when my system went down one night, all the inbound data was queued correctly "outside" and flowed in nicely when i fixed the problem. email actually works much better than people think. -- |-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----| codewarrior@daemon.org * "ah! i see you have the internet twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown) that goes *ping*!" andrew@crossbar.com * "information is power -- share the wealth."