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Re: transition to MASS, was Why we really don't require requirements

2004-10-10 17:30:43

Right now no MTA handles MASS mail signatures, so transition model is all
the same for any proposal and involves adding new programming. ...

Your MTA handles MASS.  My MTA does not handle MASS.  You send me a
message.  What happens?  That's the transition question.

Some MTA (early adaptors) begin to add signatures. At first most don't
know what it is and they are simply ignored by MTAs and by MUAs.

As has been pointed out about a dozen times in the past week, quite a lot
of mail is received by programs that are not MUAs.  They include mailing
list managers, service gateways, and other stuff.  A lot of those programs
don't handle MIME at all.  If MASS adds MIME sections to mail that used to
be plain text, a lot of those programs will fall over and die when they
get MASS-ized messages.

The only conclusion I can draw from your mail to date is that you expect
that MASS users who wish to communicate with non-MIME applications are out
of luck unless and until those applications are rewritten to add MIME
handling.  If that's your intention, OK, although that strikes me as kind
of a lot of collateral damage.  If that's not your intention, you'll have
to explain more clearly how the mail will continue to work.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet 
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.


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