ietf-822
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Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2002-12-24 15:54:02

--On Tuesday, December 24, 2002 11:10 AM -0800 Russ Allbery <rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu> wrote:

In any event, there is widespread feeling on the USEFOR list that failure
to provide for Unicode newsgroup names would basically make the entire
effort of producing a new standard pointless, and all of the solutions
seem to have significant problems.  There seems to be a consensus that
using raw UTF-8 in the Newsgroups header for Usenet articles is the least
bad choice.

I think the current text on gatewaying such messages to mail is completely insufficient. The algorithm given in 5.5.2 won't display in any clients without modifications, despite those clients having UTF-8 support.

My gateway is an IMAP server which is used by clients to read netnews. IMAP is a superior protocol to NNTP for end client access (it has server-side seen state, secure authentication, and other features) and it would be nice not to lock this out.

The majority of e-mail clients interpret untagged 8-bit in their local character set, which is likely not UTF-8, so ignoring the standards is not a reasonable or acceptable answer. Using message/rfc822 to identify articles (as in 6.21.2.2) with unencoded 8-bit headers is highly harmful for processing messages.

Section 6.21.3 says
  Injecting and relaying agents MUST NOT change the encoding of
  articles passed to them. Gateways SHOULD NOT change the encoding
  unless absolutely necessary.

Please reconcile this with RFC 2822; you are already identifying non-RFC 822 messages are "message/rfc822" _and_ you say that gateways shouldn't change this. What about clients saving messages to a local filesystem? Should the mime type be identified as "message/rfc822"?

Larry


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