Re: I-D ACTION:draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.txt

Nathaniel Borenstein <[email protected]> Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:54:17 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.smtp,gmane.ietf.imaa
Message-ID <[email protected]>

On Sunday, January 25, 2004, at 08:47  PM, [email protected] wrote:

> And for designers, programmers, and quicker implementation its quite a 
> bit
> better if new protocol and old one share certain components. For 
> example
> MIME encoding/decoding, etc.

Well, let's not rule out improvements to MIME in the process.  The name 
MIME includes a lot of things, from the two-level content-type 
architecture to the quoted-printable and base64 transfer encodings.  
I'd certainly like to see us keep the former, but the latter can only 
be seen as warts for backward compatibility with SMTP/822.  I wouldn't 
make it one of the major goals of email NG, but I certainly wouldn't 
mind seeing the new protocol eliminate the need for 
content-transfer-encodings.

Another comment:  I strongly urge moving this discussion to the new 
mail-ng mailing list once it's up and running.  The imaa and smtp 
mailing lists will make a lot more short-term progress if the 
longer-term discussions have their own venue.  -- Nathaniel