I like the spirit of this idea. I'm glad to see existing technologies being leveraged. However, it still seems quite a dog's breakfast of parts and pieces that don't all seem to be necessary.
I'd like to see this split out into several parts, which could then be used together if necessary.
The basic idea -- how to format and transfer short-form (chat-style) messages using existing email standards -- is brilliant. This seems similar to how AMP describes a limited set of HTML, and would be worth defining carefully.
The management of distributed contacts and group lists seems to be a different problem entirely. Personally, I don't need this: I'm fine with using my existing address/contact lists of trusted friends, along with time-tested tools like mailing lists.
The idea of editing/deleting messages seems superfluous and complicated. I've never knowingly used a chat system that provided this feature, nor have I ever wished I had it.
Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything about how SMTP would be used. It seems that by the time a short message is wrapped up into its attachments and headers, then sent to to the appropriate SMTP server (along with login & negotiation), I've probably sent over 20KB. That's a lot of data for one tiny message.
I would love to be able to use COI without a special client at all, just my current email client. However, the spec seems to require certain headers that would generally be difficult to configure in most email clients.
I'm concerned that the spec does not include any discussion of error handling. There are many things that can go wrong, especially with an asynchronous protocol like SMTP/IMAP. How are those problems going to be handled?
I'd like to see this split out into several parts, which could then be used together if necessary.
The basic idea -- how to format and transfer short-form (chat-style) messages using existing email standards -- is brilliant. This seems similar to how AMP describes a limited set of HTML, and would be worth defining carefully.
The management of distributed contacts and group lists seems to be a different problem entirely. Personally, I don't need this: I'm fine with using my existing address/contact lists of trusted friends, along with time-tested tools like mailing lists.
The idea of editing/deleting messages seems superfluous and complicated. I've never knowingly used a chat system that provided this feature, nor have I ever wished I had it.
Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything about how SMTP would be used. It seems that by the time a short message is wrapped up into its attachments and headers, then sent to to the appropriate SMTP server (along with login & negotiation), I've probably sent over 20KB. That's a lot of data for one tiny message.
I would love to be able to use COI without a special client at all, just my current email client. However, the spec seems to require certain headers that would generally be difficult to configure in most email clients.
I'm concerned that the spec does not include any discussion of error handling. There are many things that can go wrong, especially with an asynchronous protocol like SMTP/IMAP. How are those problems going to be handled?