On Sunday, January 25, 2004, at 08:47 PM, william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net wrote:
And for designers, programmers, and quicker implementation its quite a
bit
better if new protocol and old one share certain components. For
example
MIME encoding/decoding, etc.
Well, let's not rule out improvements to MIME in the process. The name
MIME includes a lot of things, from the two-level content-type
architecture to the quoted-printable and base64 transfer encodings.
I'd certainly like to see us keep the former, but the latter can only
be seen as warts for backward compatibility with SMTP/822. I wouldn't
make it one of the major goals of email NG, but I certainly wouldn't
mind seeing the new protocol eliminate the need for
content-transfer-encodings.
Another comment: I strongly urge moving this discussion to the new
mail-ng mailing list once it's up and running. The imaa and smtp
mailing lists will make a lot more short-term progress if the
longer-term discussions have their own venue. -- Nathaniel