Re: [EAI] Re: draft-hurtta-eai-messagestore-00.txt

["Charles Lindsey" <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:54:29 -0000, Frank Ellermann  
<nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de> wrote:

> Kari Hurtta wrote:
>
> > http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hurtta-eai-messagestore-00.txt

> | To discover message is UTF8SMTP message may require that
> | all message header fields (including header fields from
> | MIME body parts) are parsed.
>
> As always that violates anything I think to know about data
> abstraction and modularization.  MIME part headers are not
> the business of agents transporting MIME 1.0 messages.  You
> are not designing message stores for 7bit MUAs.  If "old"
> 8bit MUAs can't handle a message/utf-8 part within an 8bit
> message/rfc822 it's no problem to be solved by the MDA:

On the contrary, MTAs that support 8BITMIME regularly take note of both  
Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding in MIME part headers of MIME  
1.0 messages, in order to downgrade them for the benefit of  
non-8BITMIME-compliant MTAs. They could just as easily do the same for  
UTF8SMTP (in fact, the same piece of code could be adapted to do both  
jobs).

That was all eecognized and, AIUI, agreed at the time we abolished the  
Header-Type header, and the main argument for abolishing it was that you  
would still have to check through the whole MIME structure because you  
could not be sure that such a Header-Type header had not been left out or  
deleted by some bad implementation.
> There are tons of MIME types not supported by any given MUA,
> and maybe the user has helper applications to deal with
> some of these "unknown" (from the MUA's POV) MIME types.

But an MTA does not need to know about those "tons of MIME types" to do  
the job we are talking about. It is really only interested in multiparts  
and a few message types.
> To read message/utf-8 parts within a message/rfc822 behind
> a "UTF8SMTP ignorant" MUA a decent text editor with macros
> to decode QP or B64 should be enough.

But even a "decent text editor" is no use unless it knows the rules for  
finding all the C-T-E headers hidden within the struture.

--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 ;                      
   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5

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