Re: Updated Email Binding

Last week at WWW2002, Rohit Khare mentioned something that I believe
demonstrates why a RFC 822/2822 binding is not a protocol binding.

During one of our Developers Day protocols panels, he suggested that
the behaviour of the "Bcc" header depended upon the semantics with which
the message was transferred.  For example, if a message that was
constructed with this SMTP binding were transferred with HTTP (a
perfectly valid thing, since HTTP also uses RFC 822), then the Bcc
header would be passed through, rather than being treated as hop-by-hop.
The processing of Bcc in the expected way *requires* that it and the
message be tranferred with email semantics.  The only way that this can
currently be done, since there exists no abstract description of what an
email binding entails, is to bind the message to an email transfer
protocol.  I don't particularly care which one is used, though I believe
SMTP is the only widely deployed standardized one.

Thanks.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2002 14:14:52 UTC