On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, John Leslie wrote:
Second, some of us would have to accept the idea of less ambiguity
whenever the word "envelope" is used. I recognize how precious this
ambiguity is to several folks. I'm not confident I can offer them
sufficient compensation for the loss...
There is no ambiguity in the RFCs over the meaning of "envelope": other
than the IMAP oddity, it is consistently used as an abbreviation for "SMTP
envelope", which means the commands preceding the message data. It has
nothing to do with the message header. Although the message header does
dual duty for transport-level and user-level fields, this doesn't mean it
has anything to do with the envelope in Internet email. Although X.400 may
have separate transport-level and user-level headers, that doesn't mean
that Internet email has such a split.
I did a survey of usage of the word "envelope" in the RFCs last December:
http://www.imc.org/ietf-smtp/mail-archive/msg01398.html
Tony.
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