Re: [apps-discuss] Multipart/report, draft-kucherawy-rfc3462bis-01.txt

[Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>]

On 28/Jul/11 00:55, [e-mail] wrote:
> Multipart/report is, or should be, a very general construct used to report
> pretty much anything relating to messages or perhaps even more general MIME
> content.
> 
> The restriction that generated DSNs and MDNs (two specific types of report)
> need to be placed at the top-level is what's needed here. Nothing more.

IMHO "generated" is not very clear here.  I roughly understand it as
referring to the act of issuing a report, automatically or not.

BTW, ARF reports, as currently used, probably have to be at top level
as well.

> In fact the best way to handle this would be to put the restriction into the
> DSN and MDN specifications that build on the multipart/report framework, and
> say something like, "Uses of the multipart/report container format MAY restrict
> the contexts in which a particular report type can appear."

Does that mean top-level implies "active"?

> [moved] We should not attempt to guess at possible future uses of
> the report framework. This sort of anticipatory restriction is what
> gets us into trouble with great regularity, and we need to stop
> doing it.

In general, I agree.  But here we are introducing a split, or
categorization, to distinguish "active", "generated", or "top-level"
from other kinds of report transmission.  How can we do so without
affecting future report types as well?

>>> I'm puzzled about the "and gateways" part.  Is it correct?
> 
> Yes. A proper gateway to X.400, for example, will turn a top-level DSN into an
> X.400 delivery report and vice versa. (It would nice if the same applied to
> MDNs and X.400 read receipts, but the semantics are so dissimilar that
> conversion is infeasible.)

I'm not familiar with X.400, but this turns out to be a clarifying
element.  Top-level reports may be converted.  In pseudo-code

  if (/^Content-Type: *multipart\/report.*report-type=([:value:]+)/ih)
  // assume h stands for header only, and :value: catches token or
  // quoted-string appropriately
  {
    switch ($1)
    {
      case "delivery-status":
      // convert
      // ...
    }
  }

The task of preserving gateway functionality allows to define the
behavior without shredding much more light on the semantics of
"top-level" vs. "wrapped".

>>> Question: in case an ARF processor forwards an abuse (mis)report to
>>> the original author, is it correct to keep multipart/report as the top
>>> Content-Type?

I'm sorry I badly expressed this point.  Consider that the original
author probably has a copy of the reported message in her "Sent"
folder.  In this particular case, an agent could do some meaningful
work with reports.  Would it make sense to send the report as
"active", so as to trigger any agent that may process it?

jm2c