I have consulted technical sources within EUnet about precisely who
has installed Keld's software and what it does. The information was
enlightening to say the least.
His software is being installed because it provides an 8-bit clean
SMTP implementation. That is their only interest in it -- as a
mechanism to transport ISO-8859-X cleanly between their backbone
sites. (EUnet has mostly a hub and spoke topology within each country
and one backbone hub site per country.) The EUnet folks I talked to
were all very firmly of the mind that 8-bit SMTP was essential and that
their users all felt it was essential.
There apparently is agreement by most of the hub site administrators
to implement Keld's software ("patches to sendmail/SMTP" to quote one
note) soon but many have not yet done so. The patches have reportedly
been made available to Paul Pomes of UIUC for inclusion in the version
of sendmail that he maintains.
There were no statements in support of using Mnemonic for anything.
All of the comments were about Keld's wonderful 8-bit clean SMTP mods.
On another note, I heard from someone in the Nordunet Engineering
Task Force (NETF) who indicated that Mnemonic was originally put in a
draft of their mail document mainly because Keld had claimed that
other organisations were in favor of using it and had committed to it.
When a NETF member investigated, that person was unable to
substantiate the claims made and I'm told that Mnemonic has now been
removed from the NETF document. I have not heard this from anyone who
is an NETF officer but I do consider the source reliable for my own
part.
I infer that the IAB and IESG have not heard formally from either
EUnet or Nordunet in support of Mnemonic since none of the Chairs of
these working groups have reported same to any of the lists. There
were formal requests for support of ISO-8859-1 and 8-bit SMTP that
reportedly were received some time back.
My fax number is +1 (202) 404-7942; please mark faxes to my
attention as it is a shared fax machine. My snail mail address is
below. If anyone has an official document from either EUnet or
NorduNet that is recent and on official stationary that documents
these official endorsements of Mnemonic, feel free to fax them to me.
Rest assured that I will telephone and fax back to the persons
responsible in those organisations for confirmation of the current
facts before reporting on any such faxed documents to any of these
lists. If I don't receive anything, I will assume that the claims
that support for Mnemonic is officially requested of the IETF aren't
correct at the present time.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil
Randall Atkinson
Mail Code 5544
Naval Research Laboratory
Washington, DC 20375-5000 USA