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

[Chris Lilley]

On Tuesday, May 4, 2004, 12:33:24 AM, ned wrote:


>> On 5/3/2004 5:15 PM, ned.freed at mrochek.com wrote:


nfmc> The issue with putting it under text is "what charset is this exactly?" I would
nfmc> be willing to ignore the issue but others may not be. 

I agree others may not be; I am one of them.

A mailbox can contain multiple messages, which can be in different
encodings.

If an entire mbox is being transferred, then making assumptions about
line endings and where they can be fiddled with seems dangerous.

Allowing transcoding also seems dangerous; it would make the internal
labelling of individual messages in the mailbox incorrect. The problem
here is that there are two levels of MIME in use; one for the mbox as
a whiole and then one for the individual emails in the mbox.

Assuming a safe fallback to text/plain;charset=us-ascii as a
reasonable presentation also seems to be unwarranted.

I suggest sticking with application/mbox and leaving encoding
declarations to the individual messages or message body parts in the
mailbox.

-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris at w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group