17 May 2012 00:11
POP3 Spec and mail drop/ Mail store organization
John C Klensin <klensin <at> jck.com>
2012-05-16 22:11:41 GMT
2012-05-16 22:11:41 GMT
These are more or less nits but some of them are a fairly large ones (and the IMAP spec should be checked to be sure it doesn't suffer from any of the same problems). The second paragraph of Section 3.1 starts "Maildrops can natively store UTF-8 or be limited to ASCII.". Essentially the same statement appears at the beginning of paragraph 4 only it says "mail store" rather than "maildrop". Issues: (1) I'm not quite sure what the difference is between a "maildrop" and a "mail store". If there isn't one, the terminology should be harmonized. FWIW, RFC 1939 mentions "maildrop" in several places but never mentions a "mail store" (or "mailstore"). If there is a difference, the document should probably go to a little more effort to identify it. (2) The second paragraph of Section 3.1 starts "Maildrops can natively store UTF-8 or be limited to ASCII." As the inclusive statement that appears to be, it is flat wrong. First, if the maildrop uses Unicode, we don't care what is stored "natively", with various flavors of UTF-16 or UTF-32 being likely (and common). We don't even care if messages are stored in whatever Charset arrives over the wire (and, indeed, storage of messages in the form in which they were delivered may be common). We require that headers be either ASCII or UTF-8 on the wire, but that says almost nothing about either maildrop storage form or message content. What we care about is that, if the messages are delivered across a POP3 interfaces with UTF-8 enabled, the(Continue reading)
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