On Dec 17 2004, Keith Moore wrote:
however message headers were originally intended for use by the author
or his user agent. a couple of exceptions were made for MTAs
(Received) and delivery agents (Return-Path). now things have gotten
out of hand, and we have everybody and his brother scribbling on the
message, so much that it's hard for the recipient (or his user agent)
to make sense of it.
Very interesting. Incidentally, I had been under the impression that
the exceptions you mention were actally part of the original
intention, ie that the header area was supposed to be a catchall for
anything that isn't body content.
what we need IMHO is something akin to an annotation facility in IMAP
and/or POP, that stores the annotations separately from the actual
message.
A few thoughts (or one single thought anyway) which come to mind:
Such an external facility won't make the annotations readily
transferable, or rather it leaves the door wide open for ad-hoc
transfer mechanisms. Full messages are easily transferred by
copying.
Whether in fact annotations should be transferable in sync
with a message is a separate question perhaps worth debating?
--
Laird Breyer.