Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!bellcore!jupiter!karn
From: karn@jupiter (Phil R. Karn)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Reliable protocols on top of email
Message-ID: <17684@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Date: 21 Sep 89 23:11:12 GMT
References: <12785@joshua.athertn.Atherton.COM> <8909201935.AA09671@gaak.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: karn@jupiter.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn)
Organization: Bell Communications Research, Inc
Lines: 11

>	Joshua Levy asks about considering E-Mail as an unreliable
>datagram transport and using existing protocols to make it reliable.

One thing to consider is the effective delay*bandwidth product of the
email network you're using, particularly if it's a multihop
store-and-forward network like UUCP. Since most of the time a message
spends in such a network is spent in disk spool files on the various
machines, the effective delay*bandwidth product is likely to be MUCH
larger than what TCP and similar transport protocols are used to.

Phil