This is a useful protocol and I support it moving to Proposed Standard.
However, I would suggest adding text covering two boundary conditions. I do
not believe these changes are large enough to require a new Last Call.
First, I would add text stating that this extension IS suitable for use on
the Submission port, as described in Section 7 of RFC 2476. This is
requested by RFC 2476 for all new SMTP Service Extensions.
Second (and less important), I would state that although CR and LF do not
represent line endings in BDAT chunks, the RFC 2781 prohibition against
using a UTF-16 charset within the text top-level media type remains. This
is because a gateway transformation of such a text object from BinaryMIME to
7bit or 8bit MIME would result in an improperly formatted MIME object that
could cause many existing mailers to fail.
If the second point is considered obvious, feel free to leave it out.
However, HTTP/1.1 is exempted from this restriction in section 19.4.2 of RFC
2616, and one argument for that exemption is that HTTP is a binary-safe
transport. There will clearly be much more gatewaying between BinaryMIME
MTAs and non-binary capable ones than from HTTP servers to non-binary
capable MTAs, so I believe that this (existing) restriction should be
reiterated.
Thanks.
- dan
--
Daniel Kohn <mailto:dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
tel:+1-425-602-6222
http://www.dankohn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: The IESG [mailto:iesg-secretary(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org]
Sent: Thursday, 2000-05-25 10:25
Cc: gregv(_at_)ieee(_dot_)org
Subject: Last Call: SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large
and Binary MIME Messages to Proposed Standard
The IESG has received a request to consider SMTP Service Extensions for
Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages
<draft-vaudreuil-esmtp-binary2-00.txt> as a Proposed Standard. This
has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working
Group.
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send any comments to the
iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org or ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org mailing lists by June 25,
2000.
Files can be obtained via
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vaudreuil-esmtp-binary2-00.txt