[Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-eai-imap-utf8-07 - Status

[<[e-mail]>]

Russ,

Status on this review - the draft is ok with the current RFC Editor
notes in the ballot, but a couple more RFC Editor notes would be
desirable.

First, the two open issues have been resolved:
> - The header upconversion behavior specification for non-UTF-8
> 	mailstores appears to be incomplete.

The rest of the specification turns out to be in RFC 3501 (base
IMAP spec) if one knows where to look (Alexey knew where to
look).  The modifications to IMAP in this draft cannot be
reasonably implemented without carefully consulting RFC 3501,
so that should be fine.

> - The recommendation to support MIME header upconversion for
>	"Other widely deployed MIME charsets" strikes me as
>	too vague to be useful guidance to implementers.

One of the RFC Editor notes replaces this recommendation with
much better language that actually provides useful guidance.

The following two editorial items are candidates for RFC Editor
notes:

(1) Section 3.1, next to last paragraph needs a couple of RFC 2119
keywords:

   Mailbox
   names must comply with the Net-Unicode Definition (section 2 of
MUST >-->^^^^

   [RFC5198]) with the specific exception that they may not contain
MUST NOT >----------------------------------------->^^^^^^^

   control characters (0000-001F, 0080-009F), delete (007F), line
   separator (2028) or paragraph separator (2029).

(2) Section 2 ought to introduce what's being added to the protocol.
Adaptations of the first two sentences in Section 10 (IANA
Considerations) would suffice.

There's a good chance that the authors have a -08 version that
contains these editorial changes.

Thanks,
--David

-----Original Message-----
From: Black, David 
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 3:04 AM
To: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; 'Gen Art'; Harald
Alvestrand
Cc: Black, David; Alexey Melnikov; XiaoDong Lee; [e-mail]
Subject: Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-eai-imap-utf8-07

I have been selected as the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) 
reviewer for this draft (for background on Gen-ART, please see 
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html). 

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call
comments you may receive.

Document: draft-ietf-eai-imap-utf8-07
Reviewer: David L. Black
Review Date: August 31, 2009
IETF LC End Date: August 31, 2009
IESG Telechat Date: September 10, 2009
 
Summary:

This draft is on the right track, but has open issues, described
in the review.

The draft appears to be in good shape, although one has to be an
IMAP expert to understand all of its implications (and I am not
an IMAP expert).  I found two open issues:

- The header upconversion behavior specification for non-UTF-8
	mailstores appears to be incomplete.
- The recommendation to support MIME header upconversion for
	"Other widely deployed MIME charsets" strikes me as
	too vague to be useful guidance to implementers.

Major issues:

Section 3.2, upconversion behavior specification appears to be
incomplete:

   If the mailstore is not UTF-8
   header native and the SELECT or EXAMINE command with UTF-8 header
   modifier succeeds, then the server MUST return results as if the
   mailstore was UTF-8 header native with upconversion requirements as
   described in Section 8.  

What happens if a header that is not upconverted is accessed with
a UTF-8 comparison string (e.g., by SEARCH)?  I presume that no
matches occur courtesy of the charset mismatch, but that needs to
be explained, as it will be a surprise to users.

Section 8 lists a number of 8859 character sets for which upconversion
of MIME headers MUST be supported, and then says "Other widely deployed
MIME charsets SHOULD be supported."  How does an implementer figure
out which character sets those would be?  As an alternative, I suggest
saying something along the lines of: any server-supported character
set that is a superset of ASCII should be supported for upconversion.
That probably leads to fewer client surprises caused by UTF-8 not
working as expected.

Minor issues:

Section 3.1, next to last paragraph needs a couple of RFC 2119
keywords:

   Mailbox
   names must comply with the Net-Unicode Definition (section 2 of
MUST >-->^^^^

   [RFC5198]) with the specific exception that they may not contain
MUST NOT >----------------------------------------->^^^^^^^

   control characters (0000-001F, 0080-009F), delete (007F), line
   separator (2028) or paragraph separator (2029).

The ABNF in this draft is extensions to ABNF specified elsewhere.
I hope that the combined ABNF grammars have been run through an
ABNF checker, but didn't see any mention of that in the IESG
comment log.  This would normally be covered by a shepherd's
report, but I did not see one.

Section 7 recommends that all IMAP clients be modified to display a
clear error when the server advertises UTF8=ONLY.  What's the
expected behavior of existing, unmodified clients?

Nits/editorial comments:

Section 2 ought to introduce what's being added to the protocol.
Adaptations of the first two sentences in Section 10 (IANA
Considerations) would suffice.

While not strictly a security consideration, it would be useful for
section 11 to point out the potential for user confusion caused by
SEARCH command match strings that have different UTF-8 representations
but display identically or similarly (strings that look like they
should match don't).

idnits 2.11.12 found a few things (I've deleted a couple of
obviously incorrect "Missing Reference:" warnings):

  Checking nits according to http://www.ietf.org/ID-Checklist.html:
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

  ** There is 1 instance of too long lines in the document, the longest
one
     being 14 characters in excess of 72.


  Miscellaneous warnings:
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

  == The document seems to lack the recommended RFC 2119 boilerplate,
even if
     it appears to use RFC 2119 keywords -- however, there's a paragraph
with
     a matching beginning. Boilerplate error?

     (The document does seem to have the reference to RFC 2119 which the
     ID-Checklist requires).

  Checking references for intended status: Experimental
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

  == Unused Reference: 'RFC2045' is defined on line 475, but no explicit
     reference was found in the text

  == Unused Reference: 'RFC2183' is defined on line 486, but no explicit
     reference was found in the text

  ** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 1341 (Obsoleted by RFC 1521)

Thanks,
--David
----------------------------------------------------
David L. Black, Distinguished Engineer
EMC Corporation, 176 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
[phone]             FAX: [phone]
[e-mail]        Mobile: [phone]
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