Editor's Note: Minutes received 8/4

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by John Klensin/MIT

Minutes of the Internet Mail Extensions Working Group (SMTPEXT)

A copy of the working draft was published as an Internet Draft
(draft-ietf-smtpext-8bittransport-05.txt) at the end of June, following
an earlier version published about a month earlier.  These two versions
were of the character of ``tying up the loose ends'', since most
significant issues had been resolved by the close of the San Diego
meeting or in list discussion shortly thereafter.  There was no
discussion on the list between the time that draft was announced and the
time of the Working Group meeting that would have implied protocol
changes; the limited discussion that did occur focused on explanatory
and specificity improvements to the document text.

The Working Group meeting itself consequently was brief and quite
focused, resolving the few remaining outstanding issues (about which
there had been little disagreement and substantially no discussion), and
then agreeing to recommend that IESG recommend a revised document as a
Proposed Standard.

The Working Group session also generated some informal discussions that
led to further specific language in the document and some clarified
features.  A revised document version was prepared after the meeting and
made available to Working Group participants both at the IETF and on the
list, and comments on it resulted in some additional minor changes.
Specific Issues addressed and resolved included:


   o Format and keywords for additional trace field information.  After
     discussion of interactions with MIME body parts, the conclusion was
     to leave the level of detail at that specified prior to the San
     Diego meeting, relying on additional MIME headers to document
     per-body-part transformations.  In summary, the trace information
     inserted by the transport in the message headers will document that
     a MIME transformation occurred and the specific changes made to
     individual body parts should be documented with those body parts.
     The Working Group strongly recommends that syntax, semantics, and
     requirements for the per-body-part audit documentation be added to
     MIME in the process of its going to draft standard.

   o Some additional tracing keywords were added to permit documenting
     the cases in which a transport agent or gateway performed a
     conversion to make an invalid message or address form valid.
     Tracing these activities may make it possible to identify and fix
     some of the historically-most-difficult problems with electronic
     mail.

   o Agreement was reached on additional clarification of the
     relationship of EHLO to commands and keywords not specified as part
     of either this enhanced protocol or RFC821.  In summary, ``old''

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     (RFC821-only) implementations are not expected to support EHLO at
     all, nor are they retroactively bound by any of the specific
     provisions of the enhanced protocol (although they are strongly
     encouraged to start registering keywords).  Implementations that
     support the enhanced protocol and, hence, EHLO, must return
     keywords for all of the non-experimental commands that they
     provide, and all of those keywords must be registered.  All
     experimental commands must start in ``X''; no keywords will be
     registered or otherwise specified that start in ``X''.

   o The requirement the EHLO return a LIMIT line (permitted message
     size information) was reaffirmed and explicitly documented.


A new Internet Draft was submitted during the IETF meeting and has been
published as draft-ietf-smtpext-8bittransport-06.txt.  The Working Group
recommends that the content of this draft be published as an RFC with
``Proposed Standard'' status.

This concludes the present phase of the Working Group's work.  Closing
out the document at this point defers action on several outline
proposals, discussed in the San Diego Minutes but never acted upon or
proposed in any detail, for future efforts as the need arises.

Attendees

Robert Austein           sra@epilogue.com
Mark Baushke             mdb@cisco.com
Alan Clegg               abc@concert.net
James Conklin            jbc@bitnic.educom.edu
Ned Freed                ned@innosoft.com
Tony Genovese            genovese@nersc.gov
Paul Hill                pbh@mit.edu
Todd Kaehler             kaehler@zk3.dec.com
Neil Katin               katin@eng.sun.com
John Klensin             klensin@infoods.mit.edu
Jim Knowles              jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov
Marjo Mercado            marjo@cup.hp.com
Keith Moore              moore@cs.utk.edu
Hank Nussbacher          hank@vm.tau.ac.il
Michael Patton           map@lcs.mit.edu
John Payne               jop@wang.com
Bradley Rhoades          bdrhoades@mmc.mmmg.com
Richard Schmalgemeier    rgs@merit.edu
Jane Smith               jds@jazz.concert.net
Gregory Vaudreuil        gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us
John Wagner              jwagner@princeton.edu



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