Subject: standards spring cleaning

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 11:49:54 +0100

Good day,

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).

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
RFC1494       Equivalences between 1988 X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies
RFC1496       Rules for downgrading messages from X.400/88 to X.400/84 
when MIME content-types are present in the messages
RFC1502       X.400 Use of Extended Character Sets
RFC1648       Postmaster Convention for X.400 Operations
RFC1740       MIME Encapsulation of Macintosh Files - MacMIME
RFC1767       MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects
RFC1848       MIME Object Security Services
RFC1985       SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting
               (ETRN)

If you believe any of the above standards should not be reclassified as 
historic, could you please send a note to [email-masked] 
with the RFC number and a brief reason as to why not and whether the 
document should be advanced.  A good reason is that the standard is 
still generally useful.  A bad reason is that a piece of old code 
implements it somewhere on the 'net.  That having been said we have a 
pretty low threshold for removing something from the above list.

Thanks for your time,

Eliot