[Old-standards] Re: standards spring cleaning

[ned.freed at mrochek.com]

> I am currently involved in an experimental process to see what it would
> take to hold to the notion that Proposed and Draft Standards shouldn't
> stay in that state forever.  There are a number of mail related
> standards that fall into this category, and I wonder if people can tell
> me whether the list of standards below (or any others on the broader
> list) should stay or go.  The original list was generated
> programmatically by looking for proposed standards below RFC 2000 that
> are not obsoleted (we'll do draft later).

I have to say I question the wisdom of moving most specifications that made it
to draft to historical, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

> Here they are:

> RFC1421       Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I:
> Message  Encryption and Authentication Procedures
> RFC1422       Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II:
> Certificate-Based Key Management
> RFC1423       Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part
> III: Algorithms, Modes, and Identifiers
> RFC1424       Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part IV:
> Key Certification and Related Services

PEM is, as far as I know, undeployed. I therefore have no issue with
moving the PEM documents to historic.

> RFC1494       Equivalences between 1988 X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies

The situation is somewhat confused, but I think RFC 2157 effectively obsoletes
RFC 1494. So this could be moved to historic.

> RFC1496       Rules for downgrading messages from X.400/88 to X.400/84
> when MIME content-types are present in the messages

In retrospect specifying a mapping to new forms for an old-at-the-time system
that by definition isn't interested in upgrading was something of a waste.  I
have no problem with moving this to historic.

> RFC1502       X.400 Use of Extended Character Sets

Some nice ideas here, but basically they never worked well if at all. No
objection to moving to historic.

> RFC1648       Postmaster Convention for X.400 Operations

Historic would be good.

> RFC1740       MIME Encapsulation of Macintosh Files - MacMIME

This stuff is widely supported and usage is fairly common. Probably should be
advanced to draft. Definitely not a candidate for historic.

> RFC1767       MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects

I'll defer to those with substantive EDI experience.

> RFC1848       MIME Object Security Services

Never deployed. Historic.

> RFC1985       SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting
>                (ETRN)

ETRN is widely supported and used. A good candidate to move to draft,
not historic.

				Ned