Date: Fri, 5 May 1995 06:16:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)nsb(_dot_)fv(_dot_)com>
Excerpts from mail: 5-May-95 Re: IETF on verge of standa..
rfb(_at_)lehman(_dot_)com (2029)
> This was something that caused a lot of people to complain when
> NSB introduced encapsulation into the CMU community when Andrew
> Messages was gaining popularity.
Actually, I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
The particular situation was that people were using Messages in
discussions on CSD (now SCS) bboards. At least some of the articles
from the Messages users were showing up encapsulated. Messages was
very new at that time. There were far more people using BAGS under
Gosling's emacs at that point.
In Andrew, we always tried really hard to represent a plain ascii
message as nothing more than plain ascii.
Yes, as I recall, you made a similar statement at the time which was
followed very shortly by a dramatic drop in incidence of encapsulated
message showing up on the bboards. This may not have been purely a
case of plain ascii messages. I recall something from your original
message saying that Messages would do something slightly different --
more likely to avoid encapsulation -- when sending a message outside
the andrew.cmu.edu domain.
All the details are fuzzy now. This is back far enough that I mostly
thought of you as some guy who's kid my girlfriend (now wife of 9
years) used to babysit :-)
BTW, another advantage of the multipart approach over the headers
approach is that it has a lower likelihood of being destructively
mucked with by gateways to non-Internet mail systems.
That is true, but seems rather uncommon. In fact, I've had the
Subject: header get garbled far more often than the X-PGP-Signed
header.
In any case, this point suggests some circular reasoning. If the mail
systems to which you refer followed community standards, the problem
that you're suggesting wouldn't exist. That they're not suggests that
the standards shouldn't be overly influenced by them.
Rick