ietf-822
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Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2002-12-30 13:30:02

In <403242662(_dot_)1040752434(_at_)majormajor(_dot_)rem(_dot_)cmu(_dot_)edu> 
Lawrence Greenfield <leg+(_at_)andrew(_dot_)cmu(_dot_)edu> writes:

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.

It was never expected that clients would decode it. Moderators may need to
arrange to do so, but Usefor discusses that elsewhere. The only case the
average mail user will encounter is in a posted-and-mailed article in
which the Newsgroups-header may look a little odd. But in an email that
header is informational only, so not semantic harm will ensue.


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.

Fine! My text does not suggest that. I merely pointed to that as one of the
things that gateways _might_ do. I think you just said you preferred one
of my other three possibilities. So do I.

Using message/rfc822 to identify 
articles (as in 6.21.2.2) with unencoded 8-bit headers is highly harmful 
for processing messages.

Why? You want us to bring back the obsoleted message/news which no known
agent currently recognizes?

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.

"unless absolutely necessary". Sometimes it will be absolutely necessary.

What about clients saving messages to a local filesystem? 
Should the mime type be identified as "message/rfc822"?

I don't see why not if that is the format of the saved object.

Anyway, the Usefor list is the place to discuss these issues. All we are
concerned with here is whether my text covers the use of RFC 2047/2231
well enough.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk      Snail: 5 
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