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Re: [ietf-smtp] [Proposal] confusing parts of the mail system, was 250-MARKDOWN

"John R Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> Fri, 11 January 2019 21:12 UTC

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Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2019 16:11:57 -0500
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From: John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: Gene Hightower <gene@digilicious.com>
Cc: John Bucy <jbucy@google.com>, ietf-smtp <ietf-smtp@ietf.org>
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Subject: Re: [ietf-smtp] [Proposal] confusing parts of the mail system, was 250-MARKDOWN
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On Fri, 11 Jan 2019, Gene Hightower wrote:
> On 10/01/2019 11.05, John Bucy wrote:
>> As I see it, the problem is a message getting stuck "in the middle"
>> where the next hop doesn't support the extension e.g. user has a
>> .forward file.
>
>> The most obvious options to me are:
>
> Why not support BINARYMIME if the MTA is doing a local delivery for
> that mailbox and it's local storage format can support it.

Because mail is complicated, and hacks that support some but not all 
deliveries make life miserable for everyone.  I cannot easily tell you 
what mail sent to my system will be delivered to local mailboxes, what 
will be consumed by programs which may or may not handle binarymime, and 
what will be forwarded to other systems.  (Most mail goes through procmail 
which decides what to do with it.)  I also cannot tell you what MUAs my 
users use and which ones handle binarymime.

For any non-trivial mail system, that level of complexity is quite 
typical.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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