I see that as of RFC 3801, the discrepancy in VPIM seems
to have been corrected, and there is some verbiage about use
(3801 section 4.2.13).
On Tue November 30 2004 21:03, Keith Moore wrote:
sounds like an opportunity for an addition to one or two of the RFC
Editor's errata pages:
1. for VPIM - point out (a) that MIXER also uses the Sensitivity field
(b) that it's possible to receive a message from a MIXER gateway that
has such a field with the value of Company-Confidential and (c) VPIM
implementations should not break when they see such a field.
2. for MIXER - point out that VPIM also uses the Sensitivity field, and
(if the VPIM uses are at odds with those in MIXER) point out that MIXER
gateways should do something reasonable if they see Sensitivity fields
with values they don't understand.
As noted above, 3801 seems to have addressed the VPIM
side of things. I'm not sure if anybody is actively maintaining
the MIXER specifications.
As best I can tell from reviewing the documents, Sensitivity
(and Importance) were defined first by MIXER in RFC 987.
VPIM then grabbed ahold of the same fields in RFC 1911.
When MIXER was revised as RFC 2156, there was a note
cautioning about other (non-MIXER) uses of these fields.
RFC 1911 was then updated to RFC 2421 (and again to
3801), apparently ignoring the MIXER cautionary note.