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draft-vaudreuil-esmtp-binary2-03.txt

2000-10-23 07:36:45
First, nice effort on this I-D.  One question:

     Note that at the time of this writing there are no mechanisms for
     converting a binary MIME object into an 8-bit MIME object. Such a
     transformation will require the specification of a new MIME content-
     transfer-encoding.

Why can't the gateway descend the nested MIME tree, converting each binary
body part to 7bit base64, except for text entities, which can be confirmed
to be valid 8bit entities, unless they have more than 1000 characters per
line, in which case they can be base64 encoded?  This is probably a lot more
trouble than it's worth, but doesn't it constitute a valid binary->8bit
gateway?

As it stands, the paragraph seems at odds with this note from RFC 2048:

   IMPORTANT:  The standardization of a large numbers of different
   transfer encodings is seen as a significant barrier to widespread
   interoperability and is expressely discouraged.  Nevertheless, the
   following procedure has been defined to provide a means of defining
   additional transfer encodings, should standardization actually be
   justified.

Am I correct in supposing that folks are unlikely to support any new
transfer encodings at this point?

                - dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
<http://www.dankohn.com>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>

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