On Thu, 24 Oct 91 18:04:18 EDT you said:
2. There needs to be a way to verify the correctness of ANY body part
that might contain binary data (be it encoded as quoted-printable,
base64, or binary).
I have said something similar more than once, and have been flamed an
equivalent number of times. I still do *not* repent...
The argument I have been flamed with is : if some application really
needs a checksum, *it* can provide it. I don't believe in this argument.
Did the designers of TCP consider leaving checksums out of it, since
each application wanting reliable data can add one of its own ?? For
binary transport in mail, checksums should be a mandatory part of the
basic function. What will happen as soon as binary transport will be
available, is that people will use it to transport binary files as they
do today with ad-hoc means (uuencode, etc). This means just passing the
existing file to the RFCXXXX mail agent, and not writing a new
application to transport this or that kind of file. And so the present
situation will continue, where corrupted files are used when received,
give strange results, with no clues about the reason (bad file to start
with, file containing something that the local version of the consumer
cannot handle, or simply corruption in transfer). Not including
checksums as a mandatory part of the binary transport capability will
hurt many unsuspecting users, often and forever.
Now I have said it once more. Sorry for those who don't like it, but at
least it will be on record. /AF