Re: [Editorial Errata Reported] RFC5322 (3400)

Keith Moore <[email protected]> wrote:

I pretty much agree with Keith.

Although I think the clarification is correct, I don't think the defect is
bad enough to cause interoperability failure, which implies it would be OK
to reject the erratum. If you decide to accept the erratum it should
probably mention that textual parts without final line terminators should
be encoded with MIME.

A couple of tangential points:

MIME describes CRLFs as line separators rather than line terminators which
is consistent with 5322 (and necessary for correctly representing the
encapsulated data) but unhelpful for resolving this niggle. RFC 3030
(BINARYMIME / BDAT) assumes lines in textual bodies are terminated rather
than separated which seems to be stricter than MIME specifies, but it
does avoid Keith's worries.

> Note that there are corner cases where simply appending CRLF could do
> harm, e.g. a MIME message consisting of a single quoted-printable body
> part and a filename specified via the Content-Disposition header field -
> e.g. some sort of application-specific data that needed to be preserved
> end-to-end.  In such a case it would make more sense to re-encode the
> message body in base64 than to simply append a CRLF.

Or you could append =<CR><LF> but I expect that would not be
bug-compatible.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <[email protected]>  http://dotat.at/
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