Re: [yam] deployment of 8BITMIME?

[Ned Freed <[e-mail]>]

Process Software's PMDF has supported 8BITMIME ever since the specification was
first released.

Sun's Messaging Server product is derived from PMDF, and has supported 8BITMIME
from it's inception. This MTA is used by many large ISPs around the world.

As for interop problem - really interesting question. We've implemented most of
the SMTP extensions that have been standardized, and most of them have had some
hiccups along the way. With ESMTP itself it was the hang up on bad command
thing, with SIZE it was not getting some error cases right, with PIPELINING it
was broken middleboxes, with NOTARY it was misunderstandings about parameter
encodings, and with CHUNKING it was missed corer cases.

But 8BITMIME? I can think of a single interop problem it has caused. (Mind you,
it's solved lots of such problems, but that's not relevant here.) This is
probably largely due to 8BITMIME being a parameterless announcement that in
practice introduces no new error states and doesn't alter the dialgue in any
significant way.

But regardlless of cause, I'd have to rank this as the least problematic
extension I've ever implemented and seen deployed.

				Ned