Re: Update of RFC 1148

[Christian Huitema <Christian.Huitema@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>My preference is to do the editing by online discussion, as the changes are
>essentially bugfixes.   I will strongly resist any significant extensions,
>although co-ordiantion with some of the SMTP extension work may well be
>appropriate.

Steve,

Apart from small bug fixes, I see one urgent requirement and one reasonable
extension.

The urgent requirement is the coordination of "gateway" tables, i.e. how to
indicate that DNS domain addresses <xxx@foo.bar> should be mapped to
/DD.RFC-822=xxx(a)foo.bar/O=gate-org/PRMD=gate-p/ADMD=gate-a/C=gate-c/. The
format of this table should have the same status as te format of the "mapping"
tables. Ideally, this could be coordinated with the DNS effort for
registering mappings; in fact, this registration can be made entirely within
the existing DNS tree, as the only key required is the RFC-822 domain name.

The reasonable extension deals with the reversible mapping of message formats,
including delivery reports and multiple body parts. This is clearly a matter
of experimentation for the moment, but I think that everybody agree that a
coordination between SMTP extensions and X.400 gateways will be very
beneficial. That could well be the starting point for the development of
multimedia, multi-protocol UAs, e.g. a multimedia version of xmh...

Christian Huitema