On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Bruce Lilly wrote:
On Thu January 6 2005 10:21, Tony Finch wrote:
As I've already explained in some detail, the term "SMTP evelope" is
defined by RFC 1123 (STD 3).
As Dave's draft doesn't use "SMTP envelope", what's the problem?
"Envelope" is understood to be an abbreviation for "SMTP envelope" in RFC
1123 and later email-related RFCs. As I've already said, Dave's draft is
redefining a word which already has a clear meaning, and giving it a less
useful meaning.
Some comments on your suggestions:
1. As you have yourself noted, several fields do not fall
neatly into either transport-related or user-related
category
This is also an argument against the misuse of the word "envelope".
2. "transport-related header fields" is rather unwieldy -- try
using that where Dave uses "envelope" in the draft -- I
believe it's impractical
Obviously it can be abbreviated to "transport fields" in running text
after the phrase has been defined.
3. In several places where Dave uses "envelope", that term
refers to a combination of extra-message information
plus parts of the message header; "transport-related
header fields" therefore isn't quite the same thing.
Yes, this is intentional. The envelope and the header are separate in
Internet email, and this distinction is much more precisely defined than
any division of the header into transport-related and user-related parts.
If you want to talk about all of a message's transport-related information
you could use that phrase, or "envelope and transport fields", or whatever
you like. I don't think people often need to talk about the concept. It's
much more common to talk about (and implement software that manipulates)
the envelope and header together as a whole rather than to split the
header into some arbitrary subsets.
Tony.
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