[Emailcore] "Beginning of the ..." in RFC 5321

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

Hi.

I just noticed that the first paragraph of Section 4.4 of RFC
5321 (and 5321bis) contains the phrase "at the beginning of the
message content" while the fifth full paragraph of that section
(starting "When the delivery SMTP server makes the "final
delivery...") uses "at the beginning of the mail data...".

That is correct given Section 2.3.9, which explicitly says that
"message content" and "mail data" are used interchangeably (and
hence that they are equivalent).  It occurs to me that a causal
reader, seeing the two in the same section, might assume that
they were different, that "message content" referred to the
material after the message header fields, and then get badly
confused.

The "minimal changes" principle requires not looking for places
to change.  On that principle, this is probably best left alone.
However, if someone sees enough possibility of confusion to
justify changing 4.4 and the several other places where "message
content" appears and then adjusting 2.3.9, this would be a good
time to ask that a ticket be opened.

One of the places that might be changed is the sixth paragraph
of Section 2.4 (starting "8-bit message content
transmission..."), which is arguably not completely clear that
8BITMIME does not allow non-ASCII characters in header fields.
If anyone is uncomfortable about that (whether we get rid of
"message content" terminology or not), again, ask that a ticket
be opened and, ideally, suggest text.  FWIW, if we wanted to
make a comment about SMTPUTF8, that paragraph would probably be
the right place to put it because doing so would make the
distinction perfectly clear.

   john
   (picking nits before someone else gets to them)