Re: [ietf-822] utf8 messages

[Mark Martinec <[e-mail]>]

Daniel Vargha wrote:
> I fully agree with Brandon, the standard SHOULD consider the use case 
> when a
> message is transferred from one system to another as a blob (e.g. flat 
> file) and
> the only available "metadata" is that the message is in MIME format. 
> Having
> some sort of well defined UTF8 indicator in the header section of the 
> message
> would make it much simpler to adopt the new standard as it would 
> require
> substantially less development effort in most cases.

It is not possible (even in the absence of SMTPUTF8 support) to be
able to transfer e-mail messages with no out-of-band ("metadata" /
envelope) information. The most obvious reason is the list of
recipient addresses, which is not present in a message itself.
Envelope sender may or may not be present in a mail header
(as a Return-Path header field). Other examples are RFC 3461 data
(RET, ENVID, NOTIFY, ORCPT). The SMTPUTF8 flag is just one more of
such out-of-band pieces of information necessary for mail transmission.

   Mark