Re: Comments on draft-klensin-email-i18n-message-00.txt

In <41948119.1078491897@[10.0.2.122]> John C Klensin <[email protected]> writes:

>Charles,

>To comment on one point, my assumption has been that, if we
>decide that the transaction encapsulation is useful and
>appropriate, we would just go to the effort ...

Sure, the problem is easily fixed if we decide to follow the RFD 2442 route.

>The other difficulty with using either 8BitMIME and an 8bit
>C-T-E or news encoding is the issue that Keith has raised
>repeatedly in other contexts: all sorts of trash gets inserted
>into headers, especially trace files, by all sorts of actors.
>While the type of brute-force, "take whatever is there and
>encapsulate it" approach of this draft won't solve that problem,
>it runs a much lower risk of making things worse than assuming
>that some stray 8bit characters are really UTF-8.

I don't see that using RFC 2442 as opposed to other methods of
encapsulation makes any difference here.

Suppose a message passes through servers A, B, C, D and E, where each is
determined to add, at the least, its own Received header. Suppose A and B
are upgraded to support UTF8-HEADERS, but C is not.

By the time B comes to deal with it, it will have acquired
    Received: by A
    Received: by B
and when B encapsulates it for sending to C, these headers will be
included in the encapsulated version, just like any other header.

Now C and D (and maybe E) add
    Received: by C
    Received: by D
etc to the headers of the _outer_ message (what ever other headers are
included in that outer message, especially possible Receiveds from A and
B, will depend on exactly how the protocol gets written).

It is not clear whether the encapsulation will be undone by D (if it has
the capability) or by the end point E. Either way, the undoing process
will need to ensure that Received headers from A, B, C and D are all
present in the final product, just as they would have been in a normal
ASCII-only message sent over that same route.

I don't see that the method of encapsulation affects this either way. In
both cases the protocol needs to state what reconstruction is to be done.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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