Subject: vacation extension: Needs to say something about message generation.

From: Marc Mutz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 15:31:08 +0200

Hi!

IMO, the vacation draft needs to say that the vacation response 
generation mechanism MUST take charsets and content-types into account 
even if the :mime parameter is not given.

Implementations SHOULD choose a fitting charset and recode the text 
given in the script (in UTF-8) into the chosen charset and apply a 
suitable CTE. At the very minimum, implementations should add
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
 MIME-version: 1.0
to the header of the generated message.

This might sound obvious, but we just encountered a vacation response 
message that had no MIME headers whatsoever, but contained 8bit-encoded 
UTF-8 text.

Marc

-- 
Mutig warf sich die kleine Überwachungskamera zwischen Täter und Opfer!
                                        --Rena Tangens / FoeBuD e.V.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 09:04:40 -0700 (PDT)

> suitable CTE.

I have no problem with suggesting this, but I don't think it rises to the level
of a SHOULD. I think we need to stop short of any sort of requirement (and
SHOULD is a form of requirement) that stuff be recoded from UTF-8 into other
charsets. Sending UTF-8 without any hint  of recoding needs to be an acceptable
option.

> At the very minimum, implementations should add

Reminding people that appropriate MIME labelling MUST be used for
whatever charset is generated is a reasonable thing to do, of course.

> message that had no MIME headers whatsoever, but contained 8bit-encoded

Sure. But we already have rules that say such messages are illegal,
regardless of whether or not they are a vacation response. It is far from
clear that anything we say will prevent this.

				Ned