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Re: [ietf-dkim] 8bit downgrades

2011-05-19 13:57:10
Murray S. Kucherawy:
Can anyone remember why there's a SHOULD for the downgrade to
7-bit in RFC4871 Section 5.3, rather than a MUST?  The likelihood
of breakage is so high when sending 8-bit data that DKIM almost
becomes pointless without the upgrade.

This would require minor surgery for MTAs that DKIM-sign on arrival,
and that downgrade only on delivery (such as Postfix).

This would require major surgery for MTAs that don't implement
MIME, or that implement MIME but have no support for downgrading
(the latter is allowed by the MIME RFCs).

Not advocating for this to be changed in -bis (yet), but someone's
asking me for the history behind that decision.

We could pretend that the future is 8-bit clean, and hope the
problem will go away eventually.

        Wietse
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