ietf-822
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Re: Erroneous content-type: Text/plain; charset=us-ascii

2004-09-02 18:51:56

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004 08:16:38 -0500 
"Vaudreuil, Greg M (Greg)" <gregv(_at_)lucent(_dot_)com> wrote:

I don't have a stomach for standardized error processing... and I doubt you
could do this right anyway. 

I was thinking much the same thing.  The problem with trying to retroactively
come up with a standard interpretation of protocol violations is that (a) it's
certain to break some existing behavior that someone finds useful or
desirable, and (b) the kinds of violations that get generated change from time
to time, and you probably want to change how they're handled.

In hindsight, it would have been nice if email had been designed so that 
errors get reported "close to" where they are generated.  To me this makes
a lot more sense than trying to fix things up on the recipient end.  Along
those lines, we could always encourage MSAs to detect and report errors in
mail messages - such as characters outside the ASCII repertoire in a body part
labeled as  US-ASCII.  So far there hasn't been a lot of interest in doing
that.  Once users realize that this improves their mail service in the long
run, maybe they'll go for it.

Keith