home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Editor's Note: Minutes received 8/4
-
- CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
-
- Reported by John Klensin/MIT
-
- Minutes of the Internet Mail Extensions Working Group (SMTPEXT)
-
- A copy of the working draft was published as an Internet Draft
- (draft-ietf-smtpext-8bittransport-05.txt) at the end of June, following
- an earlier version published about a month earlier. These two versions
- were of the character of ``tying up the loose ends'', since most
- significant issues had been resolved by the close of the San Diego
- meeting or in list discussion shortly thereafter. There was no
- discussion on the list between the time that draft was announced and the
- time of the Working Group meeting that would have implied protocol
- changes; the limited discussion that did occur focused on explanatory
- and specificity improvements to the document text.
-
- The Working Group meeting itself consequently was brief and quite
- focused, resolving the few remaining outstanding issues (about which
- there had been little disagreement and substantially no discussion), and
- then agreeing to recommend that IESG recommend a revised document as a
- Proposed Standard.
-
- The Working Group session also generated some informal discussions that
- led to further specific language in the document and some clarified
- features. A revised document version was prepared after the meeting and
- made available to Working Group participants both at the IETF and on the
- list, and comments on it resulted in some additional minor changes.
- Specific Issues addressed and resolved included:
-
-
- o Format and keywords for additional trace field information. After
- discussion of interactions with MIME body parts, the conclusion was
- to leave the level of detail at that specified prior to the San
- Diego meeting, relying on additional MIME headers to document
- per-body-part transformations. In summary, the trace information
- inserted by the transport in the message headers will document that
- a MIME transformation occurred and the specific changes made to
- individual body parts should be documented with those body parts.
- The Working Group strongly recommends that syntax, semantics, and
- requirements for the per-body-part audit documentation be added to
- MIME in the process of its going to draft standard.
-
- o Some additional tracing keywords were added to permit documenting
- the cases in which a transport agent or gateway performed a
- conversion to make an invalid message or address form valid.
- Tracing these activities may make it possible to identify and fix
- some of the historically-most-difficult problems with electronic
- mail.
-
- o Agreement was reached on additional clarification of the
- relationship of EHLO to commands and keywords not specified as part
- of either this enhanced protocol or RFC821. In summary, ``old''
-
- 1
-
-
-
-
-
- (RFC821-only) implementations are not expected to support EHLO at
- all, nor are they retroactively bound by any of the specific
- provisions of the enhanced protocol (although they are strongly
- encouraged to start registering keywords). Implementations that
- support the enhanced protocol and, hence, EHLO, must return
- keywords for all of the non-experimental commands that they
- provide, and all of those keywords must be registered. All
- experimental commands must start in ``X''; no keywords will be
- registered or otherwise specified that start in ``X''.
-
- o The requirement the EHLO return a LIMIT line (permitted message
- size information) was reaffirmed and explicitly documented.
-
-
- A new Internet Draft was submitted during the IETF meeting and has been
- published as draft-ietf-smtpext-8bittransport-06.txt. The Working Group
- recommends that the content of this draft be published as an RFC with
- ``Proposed Standard'' status.
-
- This concludes the present phase of the Working Group's work. Closing
- out the document at this point defers action on several outline
- proposals, discussed in the San Diego Minutes but never acted upon or
- proposed in any detail, for future efforts as the need arises.
-
- Attendees
-
- Robert Austein sra@epilogue.com
- Mark Baushke mdb@cisco.com
- Alan Clegg abc@concert.net
- James Conklin jbc@bitnic.educom.edu
- Ned Freed ned@innosoft.com
- Tony Genovese genovese@nersc.gov
- Paul Hill pbh@mit.edu
- Todd Kaehler kaehler@zk3.dec.com
- Neil Katin katin@eng.sun.com
- John Klensin klensin@infoods.mit.edu
- Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov
- Marjo Mercado marjo@cup.hp.com
- Keith Moore moore@cs.utk.edu
- Hank Nussbacher hank@vm.tau.ac.il
- Michael Patton map@lcs.mit.edu
- John Payne jop@wang.com
- Bradley Rhoades bdrhoades@mmc.mmmg.com
- Richard Schmalgemeier rgs@merit.edu
- Jane Smith jds@jazz.concert.net
- Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us
- John Wagner jwagner@princeton.edu
-
-
-
- 2
-