[Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-hall-mime-app-mbox-00.txt]

[Eric A. Hall]

As per RFC2048, I'm planning to propose an application/mbox media-type.
The impetus for this is as follows:

  1.      Background and Overview

     UNIX and look-alike operating systems have historically made
     extensive use of "MBOX" mailbox files for a variety of messaging
     purposes. In the common case, these files are used to hold
     collections of electronic mail messages which users manipulate as
     "folders" of a private mail-store. These files are also frequently
     used by a variety of back-end email services, including delivery
     servers, filtering systems, and mailing-list programs. Over the
     last few years, the use of these files has also spread to other
     operating systems, with a variety of messaging tools on numerous
     platforms now providing direct access to MBOX files.

     The increased pervasiveness of these files has led to an increased
     demand for improvements in cross-system, network-wide interchange
     of these files. In turn, this requirement also dictates a need for
     a media-type definition for MBOX files in general.

     For example, some applications allow users to open MBOX files as
     discrete data-objects, but use platform- or product-specific
     mapping techniques to identify these files. Similarly, many
     mailing list archive programs provide access to MBOX files for
     historical messages, but will publish these files as text/plain or
     some other generic media-type, but which causes problematic end-
     of-line conversions when these files are transferred across a
     network, or which does not provide for local actions that should
     be performed against the data (such as prompting the user to
     import the mailbox data into a local mail-store). The definition
     of a standard media-type for these files would facilitate a more
     consistent behavior for these types of actions, and would further
     the cause of interoperability.

     Note that this specification does not define the MBOX data file as
     an authoritative Internet data-type or structure. Instead, it
     merely seeks to define a standard media-type definition for these
     files, so that their transfer may be more consistent.

According to my reading of 2048 this should be pretty straightforward,
although the lack of a clear authoritative spec may be problematic.

Please review and advise.

Thanks

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

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