Subject: [EAI] Comments on POP3 support

From: Marcos Sanz/Denic <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 16:59:06 +0200

All,

these are my comments on draft-newman-ima-pop-00. I haven't been following 
the last discussions in the list. If some of these issues (or any of those 
in my following mails) have already been dealt with, then just give me a 
pointer.

* Abstract: "to support unencoded international characters". That is a bit 
bizarre of a formulation. What about: "to support non-ASCII characters 
without MIME-encoding" or something similar?
* Section 3: "the exact octect counts returned by the RET8 command". If I 
got it right, what the RET8 (LST8) command(s) should return is not octect 
counts but characters, right? Otherwise what is the difference to the 
non-i18n-commands?
* Section 4: "Any attempt to use any of these three commands will result 
in an error response. As this is an incompatible change to POP3, a clear 
warning is necessary". It just strikes to me the different words "error" 
and "warning" (for me clearly different category levels) meaning the same.
* FWIW: I am for the inclusion of TOP8 in this standard, but as an 
optional command (argument).

Best regards,
Marcos

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From: Chris Newman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2006 23:09:42 -0700

> without MIME-encoding" or something similar?

I'll attempt a re-wording.

> counts but characters, right? Otherwise what is the difference to the

LST8 returns the exact number of octets that will be returned by the RET8 
command.  UTF-8 headers will have a different octet count from RFC 2047 encoded 
headers, so LST8 will often be different from LIST.  Octet count is useful to 
prepare a buffer for data transfer (although checks are still necessary), or 
for canonical UTF-8 storage of the message.  Character count would only be 
useful for a client which used UCS-4 internally.  Most operating systems use 
UTF-16/UCS-2 or UTF-8 internally, so a character count (UCS-4) doesn't seem 
particularly useful.  It could also be expensive to compute (require scanning 
the entire message).

> and "warning" (for me clearly different category levels) meaning the same.

I'll attempt a re-wording.

> optional command (argument).

I'm putting TOP8 in as optional.

                - Chris

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From: Marcos Sanz/Denic <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:58:49 +0200

Chris,

> headers, so LST8 will often be different from LIST.

Thanks, now I get it. Then the following rationale strikes me:

   LST8 is optional to minimize the cost of deploying UTF-8 support on a
   legacy mail drop.  The server load necessary to perform up-conversion
   on every message in the mail drop to determine the LST8 octet-counts
   would be prohibitively expensive when there's no way to cache those
   counts.

As far as I can see the practical problem is a client issuing the command 
LST8 without arguments (since LST8 msg is not more of a burden than RETR8 
msg). Naive question: wouldn't the immediate solution be to make "LST8 
msg" a required command, and then, adding the optional argument would 
indicate support of raw "LST8" without args?

Best regards,
Marcos