Re: Intolerant iMIP receivers

[Bruce_Kahn@xxxxxxxx]

(Attempt to re-reply...)

Frank asked:
>However, are we making a jump when we ask a CUA to
>adhere to the same conformance as a MIME conformant MUA? Aren't they
>different beasts?

That depends on your architecture.  There may be separate MUA and CUAs (as
John later described as his view of the iTIP/iMIP world) or a hybrid
critter.

If you go the route of the MUA and CUA are separate beasts then the CUA has
the issue of dealing with ATTACHMENT= and ALTREP= property parameters.
While any ATTACHMENT= value is _likely_ not to be a multipart MIME body
part, an ALTREP= one has a much greater possibility of being multipart (ie:
text/html & application/ms-tnef).  So, if your distinct CUA plans to try
and use the ALTREP= property parameter then I think full MIME conformance
is a must for it.   Cutting corners and just designing your CUA to expect
ALTREP= to be just, say, text/html is a very very poor design that
customers will soon give up on.

If you got the route of a hybrid MUA/CUA then you already have some kind of
MIME engine designed so you can properly handle the MIME data you retrieve
via IMAP, POP3, etc.  One would hope that your engine would be MIME
conformant in this case; or at least know how to skip over multiparts
entirely so they are opaque.  (This then assumes your CUA wont be able to
do 'full' ALTREP= handling too).

Being the volunteered co-scribe for the meeting I missed part of this
original thread while revising some of the notes.  Could someone explain to
me and the list just how this issue w/iMIP came up?

Bruce