Re: A proposal

[kankkune@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Risto Kankkunen)]

> B. Mandate that the third token on the 220 greeting line be some
>    magic, like "8859-1", unlikely to be part of a normal greeting.

If a round-trip must be avoided and the reply code method isn't
feasible, something like this might be tried. The magic shouldn't say
anything about the character set, though, if you only want to advertize
your 8-bit capability. Something like "I-HAVE-EIGHT-BIT-DATA-PATH" might
be better. The server could also tell at the same time if it can do
binary.

> I thus propose that for multi-part, multi-media messages, we adopt a new
> verb in place of MAIL, but otherwise identical:

> 	MESG From:<erik@naggum.uu.no>
> 	250 OK, accepting binary message
> 	RCPT To:<enag@ifi.uio.no>
> 	250 OK, he's here
> 	DATA 59636
> 	<59636 bytes of content>
> 	250 OK, message delivered

Multi-part and multi-media has nothing to do with the extended SMTP.
These formats should be specified in the RFC822 follow up. I assume you
mean MESG would indicate that the message is transferred in binary. Why
do you change the MAIL verb instead of DATA? Keep the MAIL and change
DATA to "BDAT 59636". Another alternative is not to announce the count
but to use the period stuffing like normal DATA. In this case the server
can read the data part the same way whether the data was 7 or 8 bit
binary or not. I'dont know if this is an advantage.

Risto


-- 
 Risto Kankkunen                   kankkune@cs.Helsinki.FI (Internet)
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