Subject: this seems to have become broken some time back

From: bill manning <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:03:10 -0800

and I guess I am the only one who might still use it - but regardless, if its broken, it should be fixed

to wit:

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-(ofthehour).txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.
_______________________________________________
I-D-Announce mailing list
[email-masked]

....  seems that the mail attachment (MIME) is no longer a copy of the draft in question, its a dummy text block.

We are sad.

--bill

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From: Joe Abley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:12:11 -0500

On 2011-01-18, at 15:03, bill manning wrote:

> and I guess I am the only one who might still use it - but regardless, if its broken, it should ....  seems that the mail attachment (MIME) is no longer a copy of the draft in question, its a dummy text block.

I don't think it was ever a copy of the draft in question; it has been an RFC1873-compliant Message/External-Body section as long as I have been watching. To draw from another random example that came through recently on i-d-announce:

> Content-Type: Message/External-body;
> 	name="draft-ietf-idr-bgp-identifier-13.txt"; site="ftp.ietf.org";
> 	access-type="anon-ftp"; directory="internet-drafts"

I've never used a mail client that knows what to do with that, though.

Joe

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:23:22 -0800 (PST)

> I don't think it was ever a copy of the draft in question; it has been an
> RFC1873-compliant Message/External-Body section as long as I have been
> watching. To draw from another random example that came through recently on
> i-d-announce:

> > 	access-type="anon-ftp"; directory="internet-drafts"

That's an anon-ftp access type, which is described in RFC 2046 section
5.2.3.3. RFC 1873 defines the content-id access-type.

> I've never used a mail client that knows what to do with that, though.

The client I'm using right now (which I coauthored) is one of the very few with
support for external body dereferencing. It's too bad really; it's a very
useful feature, especially if the client does a good job of merging the
external reference into the message.

				Ned

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From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:38:51 +0100

On 19/Jan/11 05:23, [email-masked] wrote:
> support for external body dereferencing.

However, your client apparently omits to identify itself by means of a
User-Agent header field...  Would you mind mentioning it by name?

TIA