Blake Ramsdell wrote:
One possibility is that we could add another SMIMECapability that is
something like "preferBinaryInside" or something like that. I'm
somewhat hesitant to suggest this, because I'm not sure if this is an
overloading of the SMIMECapabilities to be MIMECapabilities also. My
gut feeling is that it might help, but I don't know if there are going
to be any concerns about the user having multiple mail agents,
intermediate gateway processing, etc.
There are definitely such concerns. I also have a concern that we
should Keep It Simple if possible. The more things that have to be
negotiated, the worse it gets.
The bottom line is that non-interoperability is not cool. Do we get
tough with the language (the inside MUST be 7-bit clean), do we come up
with a protocol patch (preferBinaryInside), or is there some other
answer.
There are two other options: require the inside to be 8-bit clean (using
the MIME definition of "8-bit data", and require all readers to handle
imbedded binary MIME.
Given the disaster the "no recursive encodings" rule of MIME has been,
I'd lean towards requiring readers do the little extra work that saves
composers and intermediaries so much headaches.