On Aug 13 2004, John C Klensin wrote:
To repeat Bruce's point from a
different perspective, if all that is intended is "here are some
nice bits, which someone has decided to call "mbox" without any
real semantics, and any information you are going to get about
how to process them is coming out of band and by agreement among
the communicating parties", then application/octet-stream is at
least nearly adequate.
I agree with this point, and would like to expand it slightly further.
Because the mbox file format is not well defined, any incidental
reformatting of an attached mbox file during mail transport would be
harmful. So it seems to me that an mbox media type should always require a
protective content encoding, either QP or Base64.
Of those two encodings, Base64 seems much preferable, because the QP
encoding can allow the mbox format delimiters (From_) to stay
unencoded. This could make proper parsing of, e.g. a QP encoding of
an mbox file attached to a message saved in an mbox archive,
needlessly difficult for common tools such as e.g. formail, especially
if the tool happens to be not MIME aware.
--
Laird Breyer.