Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 11:05:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@Panda.COM>
Sender: Mark Crispin <mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
Subject: Re: end-of-message indication in SMTP
To: John Gardiner Myers <jgm+@CMU.EDU>
Cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
In-Reply-To: <0jnSEla00WBwA9xqMG@andrew.cmu.edu>
Message-Id: <MailManager.802029959.19114.mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII

On Thu,  1 Jun 1995 12:00:49 -0400 (EDT), John Gardiner Myers wrote:
> The octet sequence <LF>.<LF> would thus only qualify as "binary data"
> and would have to be transfer-encoded in order to be sent over base
> SMTP or ESMTP with the 8BITMIME extension.

This seems fine to me.

> > 1) Simplify the syntax, remove obnoxious restrictions:
> >     a) Remove ".", "[", and "]" from specials.
> >     b) Redefine local-part as word.
> >     c) Redefine domain as atom.
> >     d) Remove sub-domain, domain-literal, and domain-ref
>
> I'm not sure it is within the charter to loosen the syntax.  I would
> like to tighten it up to get rid of some hard-to-parse constructs that
> are never used.

I hope that the answer is yes and yes (but I would like to hear what you think
is "never used" first), but we should get a charter ruling first.

I believe that my proposed loosening not only simplifies the syntax, it's also
what most people actually implement.

> I think we might be in a situation where we need two syntaxes, one for
> sending, one for receiving.

If you saw the code in c-client, this is exactly what I do; I parse according
to the looser syntax, and generate according to strict 822.  I'd hate to put
that in the spec, but it's certainly the pragmatic approach.

> As an aside, a *lot* of things have been fixed in sendmail version 8.
> For example, Errors-To: is ignored by default.  I usually say that
> people who complain about sendmail should take a look at recent
> versions.

Old versions of sendmail are never going to go away.  Nor are people who
decide that the way to implement things is to copy what old versions of
sendmail do.

*Sigh*

-- Mark --

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