From: "Chris Lewis" <clewis(_at_)nortelnetworks(_dot_)com>
...
There are other things the IETF lists should do instead. To start,
they should rejectm mail with MIME content headers declaring mail is
not English, and specifically reject JP, KR, and GB character sets.
The IETF has no foreign language special interest groups? Like on
character sets and internationalization? It would be as dumb as a
pharmaceutical company banning the V word.
If there are any IETF working group mailing lists that do not use
ASCII-English, then those should be exempted. However, as far as I
know, there are no such mailing lists. Because of the nature of the
IETF, there I doubt any such WG list should use anything but the global
international standard character set. The IETF is supposed to be
international, and that means that its official communications must
use the international language. That the international email language
today happens to involve a national varient of an old international
character set is an accident of history that is handy for some of us,
unfortunate for others, and unchangable for the foreseeable future
for all of us.
Test mailing lists, private mail, and so forth are different.
They should probably also reject any MIME multipart mail,
That would annoy the Mime, multimedia and other specialized WGs would it
not?
Again, the offical IETF mailing lists are supposed to be "inclusive."
Contrary to some politically correct silliness, in this case that does
not involve pretending everyone understands all languages and formats,
but using the greatest common divisor. All IETF mailing lists
submissions should use the single, common form everyone involved can read.
It could make sense for a mail working group to have a special test
mailing list that uses very different protocols than 7-bit plantext ASCII,
but the official, archived, public record, subject to the "Note This"
blather working group mailing lists are not those.
I think they should also use the DCC to reject all bulk mail, but
that's probably only my bias speaking.
That's a _much_ better idea than banning specific character sets or mime.
Maybe so or maybe not. Using the DCC to reject all bulk mail would
prune a lot of conference announcements and calls for papers. I think
that would be a good thing, but I know others disagree with me.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com