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Re: transfer-encodings on subtypes of "message"

Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no Tue, 06 June 1995 07:23 UTC

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From: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
To: hansen@pegasus.att.com
cc: John Gardiner Myers <jgm+@cmu.edu>, ietf-822@dimacs.rutgers.edu
Subject: Re: transfer-encodings on subtypes of "message"
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 05 Jun 1995 22:27:00 EDT." <9506060254.AA07867@ig1.att.att.com>
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Date: Tue, 06 Jun 1995 08:08:23 +0200
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For message/partial, the problem was solved by requiring the use of only
7bit encoding - see section 7.2.2.2 of draft-ietf-822ext-mime-imt-01.txt;
I believe similar prose existed in RFC 1521.

The reason for the restriction was to avoid "nested encodings", which
would require multiple passes over a message in order to decide whether
it was possible to handle the message or not; this was considered a Bad
Thing by the original MIME group.

At the moment, I'm almost tempted to take one of Stef's ideas and define
an Application/MIME type which can encapsulate anything (includig an 8bit
message/*) and apply a transfer encoding, in order to get out of this bind.
But I don't like this "solution".

8-to-7-bit downgrading needs to be studied!

           Harald A

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