km> and note that I didn't say 'indefinitely'. but lots of people
km> keep old mail around. while it's hard to argue that people should
km> keep buying 5.25" disk drives for the sake of reading their old
km> floppies (partially because the medium is essentially useless for
km> storage of new things), it's a bit easier to argue that MUAs
km> should contain a bit of extra code to handle slight differences in
km> message format that were once widely used.
Yes, but that's an MUA issue. I repeat: what has this got to do with
IETF wire protocols?
Earlier, someone said "on most systems, the wire format and the
storage format are essentially thesame. (modulo line-ending
differences)".
In the first place, so what? Extending an IETF wire protocol will not
erase your MUA from your disk drive. You can still use it to read old
email.
In the second place, though, I think the claim "on most systems" is
not correct. Unix-centric minds think that way, but I'm pretty
confident that the vast majority of individual users are not in that
situation. Their email is gatewayed into some proprietary format
either by their service provider or by their MUA (think AOL, think MS
Outlook). Email geeks like us get asked on a regular basis "how do I
rescue my old email which is trapped by XZY program in some
proprietary format?" For those users, one email client switcheroo is
all it takes to wipe the slate clean of the "old email"
consideration.
In the third place, I'd be willing to bet that people who are in the
situation of having vast archives of old email stored in a format
essentially the same as the wire format also fall into one or both of
these buckets:
* The format is one of 3 or 4 extremely popular storage formats, and
handy converters will spring up like tampopos in springtime.
* The MUA in question is one of 10 or 12 extremely popular MUAs,
probably with readily available source code, and their popularity
will make them among the first to be converted to anything new.
Hey, I'm completely sympathetic to people who have vast email
archives. I'm one of those packrats. But I consider that *my*
problem to keep up with, not the IETF's.
--
bill(_at_)carpenter(_dot_)ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119
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