Hello Barry,
Here's my RUR .02:
On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 12:38:33AM -0500, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>
> Ben> This would violate RFC 1522:
>
> SJT> That's right. People with broken mailers have broken
> SJT> mailers. Make sure that things are robust for those with
> SJT> decent software, and then do what we can for the former poor
> SJT> souls.
>
> Totally agreed. I mean, look at me, a "dinosaur" who uses a
> MIME-aware MUA in a system that was never originally designed to
> support the stuff you get in email these days. And it's mostly bug
> free <wink>. (Aside to Stephen: do you know if Kyle still handles VM
> bug reports these days? ;).
>
> The only hope we have of interoperating is to support the standards,
> or at least not willfully break them <Hippocratic oath wink>. Which
> means if the charsets don't match, we can't simply tack on headers and
> footers.
This steps on my pet peeve with Mailman:
Does this matching regard Content-Transfer-Encoding as well?
Tacking on text strings to a base64 text/plain body is a recipe for
disaster, and such things happen, believe it or not.
> So we either don't add them or we add some multipart/mixed
> chrome and do it in a MIME-compliant way.
Continuing the Hippocratic theme, I'd suggest a rule: don't meddle if
it could hamper someone's reading capabilities. In this case, don't make
multipart/mixed embellishments unless it IS multipart/mixed already.
All other conversions would break some client's subtle neck or make
things look uglier. God forbid messing with multipart/alternative or
multipart/signed. It's only bulk informational add-ons, why shove it
down everyone's throat?
For the same reason, I would object things like recoding
to and fro base64 to modify content. Above all, that would put
an unnecessary load on the mail processor.
> I really don't want to think about PGP right now. Mailcrypt w/GnuPG
> seems to only sign or encrypt the body, and in a non-MIME way, so if
> we wanted to add headers and footers it seems like we'd be safe by
> wrapping the original body in multipart/mixed chrome. Of course you'd
> have to unpack the parts to verify (read) the signed (encrypted)
> part. Oh well, there's not really much more you /can/ do.
I second the opinion that for the MUAs that use "magic" PGP tags in
plain/text bodies, it would be safe to add text above and below.
--
Stay tuned,
MhZ JID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
___________
In the misfortune of our friends we find something that is not displeasing
to us.
-- La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims"
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