lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) (05/29/91)
... are now available via anonymous FTP from turbo.bio.net. Note that there are three forms of the ietf-822 document - text, PostScript, and Andrew. Most, if not all, of the issues addressed in those drafts are relevant to us. Eliot Lear [lear@turbo.bio.net]
Harri.Salminen@funet.fi (Harri K Salminen) (06/04/91)
I just looked on those smtp-extension drafts and they are not the ones I was referring to. In NORDUNET NETF Mail Harmonization Working Group (netf-mhs) there has been very active work on drafting a proposal for RFC and for pilot experiments. They have devised a fairly novel scheme that doesn't break any existing SMTP host (they expect word (8-bit) in Helo reply to recongize friends :-), will allow for multipart, multimedia mail which will get transported transparently even via old 7 bit paths by use of various conversion algorithms. For descriptive in headers they propose to use ISO 10646-5 character set (We'd like to get peoples personal names written right) and maybe more later. Their plan is to be able to support all kinds of text (I think the JUNET would like it :-) and still be compatible (and even readable if possible) with all those old US ASCII mail systems around. I'm not directly participating in that group but you could contact the groups chairman Harald T. Alvestrand <Harald.Alvestrand@elab-runit.sintef.no> in case you are interested. I think they know what smtp-ext is doing but they want to prove their point first and propose it to IETF... Here's some conclusions from the March 91 NETF meeting that was publicly laying around in nic.nordu.net netf-mhs directory. The formal RFC like paper is probably being drafted along with the pilots. In conclusion, whatever the outcome from the SMTP extension work is, we could just make provisions and references in the NNTP standard to it. The netnews message format might need extensions as well, maybe it should be tackled after we agree on a versatile enough NNTP specification that can support multimedia, security and later extensions (negotiation procedure to find out what the other end supports). Harri