WJCarpenter wrote:
km> it takes a very long time before support is no longer required -
km> people still want to be able to read old email or news messages.
I'm a little confused by this line of reasoning. We're talking about
wire formats, not storage formats, aren't we? What has reading old
anything got to do with protocols?
To name just one case; forwarding of old messages, either via the
infrequently used 822/2822 Resent- header fields, or by MIME
message/rfc-822 encapsulation, or by cut-and-paste.