On Wed, Feb 25, 1998 at 10:32:40AM +0000, Philip Hazel wrote:
>
> I have avoided building any knowledge of MIME into Exim, as I think that
> a transport agent should concentrate on transporting.
I agree, that Exim should not *parse* MIME-messages and do thinks
like sendmail does: Translating Mails from 8bit to 7bit and back.
But an evolving or evolved standart for error notification is
something really required. Just think of all the mailing list
problems and the lack of automatically unsubscribing people.
DSN as described in rfc1891 would even allow you to automatically
unsubscribe people who subscribed with "me@???" or
"sven@???" if their "final" account like "sven@???"
has expired.
*Coding* a MIME-message is easy, though for me it's pain to read
as well (loving elm / mutt). However, the reasons why things are
getting more complicated are obvious. Probably "we" one day even
want to allow chinese people using the Internet without having
to learn English first - and a world with more than one language
and one charset (ISO-8559-1? US-ASCII?) requires mechanisms like MIME and
Transfer-Encoding. Probably if Turkish people were more envolved
in building up the Internet, ISO-8559-8 would be nowadays the
considered "standart"-charset and the ISO-8559-1-world would
complain about unreadable messages.
I consider an error message should both be
- understandable for humans
- parseable / understandable for mailing software
The first is the current situation, the later a RFC, that other
mailer implement already. To join both, we have to use MIME.
Greetings,
Georg
--
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