I am currently involved in an experimental process to see what it would
take to hold to the notion that Proposed and Draft Standards shouldn't
stay in that state forever. There are a number of mail related
standards that fall into this category, and I wonder if people can tell
me whether the list of standards below (or any others on the broader
list) should stay or go. The original list was generated
programmatically by looking for proposed standards below RFC 2000 that
are not obsoleted (we'll do draft later).
I have to say I question the wisdom of moving most specifications that made it
to draft to historical, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Here they are:
RFC1421 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I:
Message Encryption and Authentication Procedures
RFC1422 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II:
Certificate-Based Key Management
RFC1423 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part
III: Algorithms, Modes, and Identifiers
RFC1424 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part IV:
Key Certification and Related Services
PEM is, as far as I know, undeployed. I therefore have no issue with
moving the PEM documents to historic.
RFC1494 Equivalences between 1988 X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies
The situation is somewhat confused, but I think RFC 2157 effectively obsoletes
RFC 1494. So this could be moved to historic.
RFC1496 Rules for downgrading messages from X.400/88 to X.400/84
when MIME content-types are present in the messages
In retrospect specifying a mapping to new forms for an old-at-the-time system
that by definition isn't interested in upgrading was something of a waste. I
have no problem with moving this to historic.
RFC1502 X.400 Use of Extended Character Sets
Some nice ideas here, but basically they never worked well if at all. No
objection to moving to historic.
RFC1648 Postmaster Convention for X.400 Operations
Historic would be good.
RFC1740 MIME Encapsulation of Macintosh Files - MacMIME
This stuff is widely supported and usage is fairly common. Probably should be
advanced to draft. Definitely not a candidate for historic.
RFC1767 MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects
I'll defer to those with substantive EDI experience.
RFC1848 MIME Object Security Services
Never deployed. Historic.
RFC1985 SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting
(ETRN)
ETRN is widely supported and used. A good candidate to move to draft,
not historic.
Ned