Keith, your long rant about protocol design philosophy contained, as far as I
can tell, no additional technical points about the document under discussion.
While continuing such a debate might be interesting on some level, I'm afraid I
have neither the time nor the interest in doing so now.
If it seems like I'm attacking the proposal harshly, it's only because
I'm painfully aware of how often SMTP is misimplemented, and because
I think that these discussions should have been had in the broader
SMTP implementor community long before IETF-wide Last Call.
I'm sorry, but I know of no IETF process requirement that working groups engage
in such discussions, nor for that matter do I know of a means a WG has to
insure that such discussions take place. (Both of your recent cross-postings to
ietf-822 and ietf-smtp respectively have produced, as far as I can tell, not a
single message from anyone who travels in those circles exclusively.)
You are of course free to follow the discussion on the various relevant WG
lists so you may make your comments on their work in a timely fashion. I
suspect people would be a lot more receptive to the sorts of changes you've
proposed if you adopted this approach. The number of IETF working groups
engaged in the SMTP/MIME/RFC[2]822 area isn't particularly large so this really
shouldn't be particularly onerous burden to assume.
Ned