IoT: Robustness principle?

Robustness principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"

The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Internet pioneer Jon Postel, who wrote in an early specification of the Transmission Control Protocol that:[1]

'TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.'

In other words, code that sends commands or data to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but code that receives input should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear.

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Now that the Internet is expanding to "Things", it is important that new protocols, APIs and tools keep the system robust, simple and expandable...

For many cases, in particular of mobile (thing) devices, it is more effective to have a thing/device behind an messaging gateway on internet than directly connected. A "thing" and gateway could use private, optimized protocols, and doing "translation" as needed.

In fact this may be preferred method for most of non-server devices and apps, and is different from most of popular internet protocols. Technically, this is "distributed messaging" and in most popular messaging protocols gateways / brokers are not distributed. But email is! Could enhanced email protocols be useful for IoT?