km> As a practical matter, nothing can really obsolete 822 as long as
km> people still need to read old mail messages.
I don't think this is a useful consideration, and it is perhaps even
harmful to the discussion at hand. People (hey, I'm one of those
people) need to read old email in a variety of file formats, and that
includes some that are very like RFC-822. It also includes many
formats which are widely different from RFC-822.
Who cares?
Software that used to understand RFC-822 will not suddenly stop
understanding it unless some implementer does something to make it so,
just as implementers already occasionally, silently do something which
isn't RFC-822 compliant.
In any event, people using RFC-822/2822-ish formats are an order of
magnitude less screwed than those whose archived email gets trapped
inside undocumented proprietary formats. There are a heck of a lot
more of those people these days, though they don't tend to participate
in IETF discussions.
--
bill(_at_)carpenter(_dot_)ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119
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