Subject: Re: Intolerant iMIP receivers

From: "Frank Dawson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 18:38:55 -0500

On Tuesday, March 16, 1999 11:32 AM, John Stracke wrote, in part:

>RFC-2049 ("MIME Conformance Criteria and Examples") says
>(section 2) that a mail user agent that is MIME-conformant MUST handle
>multipart/mixed and multipart/alternative.  So I think the answer is
>that, yes, an iMIP-based CUA must recognize multipart/mixed and
>multipart/alternative.

I would agree with your suggestion that CUAs conforming to RFC 2447/iMIP
should be able to receive all the various type of iCalendar encapsulation
outlined in the spec. 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?

-- Frank

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 23:58:59 +0000

Frank Dawson wrote:

> are we making a jump when we ask a CUA to

Mmm, yes or no, depending where you draw the line.  My view is that the iMIP
message is received by an MUA, which passes the iCalendar to the CUA.  The
CUA doesn't have to handle MIME, but the MUA does.  If you build a single
application which is an MUA with an integrated CUA, then MIME dictates the
MUA-like behavior.

So...I guess the "must" I was speaking about before impacts the behavior of
the whole system, but is irrelevant to the CUA per se.

(Note that not all of the encapsulations in 2447 rely on mandatory MIME
features.  In particular, 4.3 and 4.6 use multipart/related, which is
optional.)

--
/=============================================================\
|John Stracke    | My opinions are my own | S/MIME & HTML OK  |
[email-masked]|============================================|
|Chief Scientist | NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed |
|eCal Corp.      |  by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch |
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