Re: this seems to have become broken some time back

[[e-mail]]

> On 2011-01-18, at 15:03, bill manning wrote:

> > and I guess I am the only one who might still use it - but regardless, if its broken, it should ....  seems that the mail attachment (MIME) is no longer a copy of the draft in question, its a dummy text block.

> I don't think it was ever a copy of the draft in question; it has been an
> RFC1873-compliant Message/External-Body section as long as I have been
> watching. To draw from another random example that came through recently on
> i-d-announce:

> > Content-Type: Message/External-body;
> > 	name="draft-ietf-idr-bgp-identifier-13.txt"; site="ftp.ietf.org";
> > 	access-type="anon-ftp"; directory="internet-drafts"

That's an anon-ftp access type, which is described in RFC 2046 section
5.2.3.3. RFC 1873 defines the content-id access-type.

> I've never used a mail client that knows what to do with that, though.

The client I'm using right now (which I coauthored) is one of the very few with
support for external body dereferencing. It's too bad really; it's a very
useful feature, especially if the client does a good job of merging the
external reference into the message.

				Ned