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FWD: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.txt

2004-01-23 14:53:34
The draft posted/described in the attached is a bizarre idea, partially to see if it is possible to consider a radical solution to an increasingly troublesome problem, and partially to see if the supportive comments about "Email NG" in Minneapolis were really serious.

I am not at all convinced that it is a _good_ idea, only that, if we are talking about radical changes to the mail infrastructure to support various extended services, this is the sort of "clean up the warts that get in the way" option we might want to consider.

And even if it were a good idea, some of the details are probably not right -- if this looks like it received a day's thought, you would probably be guessing much too high.

Discussion should probably go to the SMTP list; IMAA is copied only because this could interact a bit with some of the "UTF-8 header" discussions.

  john
--- Begin Message ---
A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.


        Title           : A Cleaner SMTP Envelope for Internet Mail
        Author(s)       : J. Klensin
        Filename        : draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.txt
        Pages           : 0
        Date            : 2004-1-23
        
During the last few years, a number of proposals for
extensions or improvements to email have run into trouble with a
side-effect of mail relaying.  In the current Internet Mail model, every SMTP 
server is required to break strict layering by inserting one or more additional 
'trace' headers into the message headers which are actually part of the SMTP 
payload.  Since the headers are
altered in transit, header-signing is not an available option, various
anti-spam and internationalization strategies are infeasible or much
more complex, and so on.  This document proposes to change the
Internet mail model to place the in-transit trace information in the
envelope, removing the requirement that relaying systems modify the
message payload.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.txt

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--- End Message ---