Re: Considering Getting Rid of My Misfin Server

Vi Grey writes:

.. to the effect that he'll be shutting down his Misfin server.

This is probably for the best.

Misfin's original author had a key insight about how to relate email-like addresses, hostnames and X509 certificates. The resulting protocol had its flaws, which the community tried to fix.

I am a little flattered to see that long after my involvement, my name still stands as the supposed author of the Misfin(C) specification's last draft. But I had to withdraw from involvement in Misfin as it was not possible to get an agreed way forward on anything further than that draft because people had conflicting assumptions about what the protocol was and what it shoud do.

Was it supposed to do the role of SMTP, or of IMAP and POP3? And was there a conceptual difference between the format of messages transmitted over the network versus stored on disk? If there *was* a specified on-disk format, could it be relied on to accommodate extensions like an IMAP-equivalent?

I learnt a *lot* about programming certain types of network application, and about writing specs. I think the whole Misfin concept should be revisited again some day, but with a clean slate. It was a good experiment, but it's over.