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- Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime
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- From: ag129@cus.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant)
- Subject: Re: Using MIME without extra mail headers
- Message-ID: <1993Jan12.205213.1154@infodev.cam.ac.uk>
- Sender: news@infodev.cam.ac.uk (USENET news)
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- Organization: U of Cambridge, England
- References: <gfIR8H600WBw8UW0Na@andrew.cmu.edu> <1993Jan12.123329.16748@infodev.cam.ac.uk> <C0r79G.2BM.2@cs.cmu.edu>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 20:52:13 GMT
- Lines: 22
-
- In article <C0r79G.2BM.2@cs.cmu.edu> ddj+@cs.cmu.edu (Doug DeJulio) writes:
- >beginning of the body would work. BUT, I would assert that this is
- >still a gateway problem. The gatewaying software should take a
- >correct MIME message and convert it into something that the broken
- >domain can understand, and it should make sure that any hacked-up
- >format is converted back into pure MIME before sending it back out
- >through the gateway again. The fact that the MIME standard is well
- >defined should simplify the task of writing such a "smart gateway"
- >somewhat.
-
- Yes, this is fine as long as you have precisely one gateway - then the
- gateway can invent any rule it likes and enforce that on all the users
- who want to send out MIME messages to SMTP or X.400 domains. The problem
- is when there are gateways all over the place. Anyway, what is this
- insistence on gateways? It would be quite reasonable for two people
- within a non-MIME-header-capable domain to want to send MIME files to
- each other. So a single convention for encapsulating MIME in files is
- the object here.
-
- Perhaps some of our American readers should try talking to their BITNET
- colleagues if they have trouble with the idea of non-MIME-header-capable
- message transfer domains.
-