re: A Formal Peace Proposal

[Mark Crispin <MRC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <>, Nathaniel Borenstein writes:
>What do people think of this idea?  In particular, are the "change SMTP"
>people willing to live with the idea that when 8 bit SMTP is unavilable,
>MTA's will automatically downgrade to the 7 bit representation selected
>by the "change 822" people?  It seems to me that this is the key to the
>whole compromise.

There must be some way to force all 8-bit implementations to support the 7-bit
downgrade, otherwise you'll have the existing situation, with SMTP senders
that talk with bare-LF newlines mostly working because of all the sendmail-
based SMTP receivers, but breaking when it hits an SMTP receiver that insists
upon CRLF newlines.