[tpop3d-discuss] whoson protocol

[Chris Lightfoot]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 09:21:43PM +0100, Chris Elsworth wrote:
> 
> Came across this while randomly browsing, and noticed exim has support
> for it too.
> 
> This would be a really nice clean solution to POP-before-SMTP if it
> were implemented in tpop3d.
> 
> What do others think?
> 
> http://whoson.sourceforge.net/

Hmm. I saw a reference to this a little while ago but
didn't chase it up.

The game (for those who haven't seen it and don't want to
wade through acres of RFCspeak and godawful Sourceforge
pages) is that you have some registry which maps IP
addresses to the identities of `trusted' users with a
protocol called WHOSON which permits submission of data to
and querying of data from the registry. The verbs defined
are LOGON, to associate a user with an IP address, LOGOFF
to remove such an association, and QUERY, to find an
association.

Presumably the intention is that the POP3 server supplies
information of this form to the who's on server. The
protocol supports LOGON and LOGOFF verbs; these would
presumably be used to correspond to start of session / end
of session in the POP3 server.

Does this really work? I thought that typical MUAs such as
Microsoft Outlook Express sent mail after checking mail,
rather than simultaneously. Or is the intention that POP3
servers don't issue LOGOUT commands?

This would be pretty easy to implement-- conceptually it's
very much like the DRAC stuff which is already in there,
especially since the WHOSON people supply a library. I'll
put it on the TODO list; perhaps[1] somebody would like
to send me a patch against 1.4.2.

    ---
    1. Hint hint. You never know, it might work....

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