Re: Mime-Version and no Content-Type

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> 
> > The point mentioned earlier may be some sort of agreed courtesy,
> > rather than a hard RFC type rule.  Possibly becaue there is some older
> > software in common  use that only recognizes upper case MIME.
> 
> Is there such a beast?

Haven't researched this myself but here is a quote from the friend
mentioned earlier that points to some documentation:

This is quoted from a recieved message


 >> Harry Putnam in <m3n24m4c79.fsf@reader.newsguy.com>:
 >> 
 >> > I've gotten myself into a discussion with Gnus developers on the mail
 >> > list "ding@gnus.org"  Mentioning your point about my mime headers as
 >> > below has quickly brought me to the end of my non-extensive knowledge.
 >> > 
 >> > Can you explain How your reasoning ran on that again?   : )
 >> 
 >> Sure, Harry. No problem. 
 >> 
 >> First off, mime postdates rfc822 so it's not really appropriate
 >> to be quoting rules from that rfc, however correct they might be.
 >> Rfc 822 does state the correct general case though, as one of
 >> your correspondents pointed out. 
 >> 
 >> I don't have full references on this point, although it's quite
 >> well known, but it appears that there are some mime
 >> implementations which parse for the "mime" portion of
 >> "MIME-Version" in upper case only, failing to recognise any other
 >> case. 
 >> 
 >> This is a breach of the mime rfcs as well, which specifically
 >> state that these headers are case insensitive. Once the genie is
 >> out of the bottle, though, the problem becomes one of
 >> interoperability rather than standards. 
 >> 
 >> A quick search of my internet drafts finds the following
 >> reference in the usefor ietf working group (revising rfc 1036)
 >> 
 >> | draft-ietf-usefor-article-01
 >> |
 >> |           Header-names are case-insensitive. There is a preferred case
 >> |           convention, which posters and posting agents SHOULD use:
 >> |           each hyphen-separated "word" has its initial letter (if any)
 >> |           in uppercase and the rest in lowercase, except that some
 >> |           abbreviations have all letters uppercase (e.g. "Message-ID"
 >> |           and "MIME-Version"). The forms used in this standard are the
 >> |           preferred forms for the headers described herein. Relaying and
 >> |           reading agents MUST, however, tolerate articles not obeying
 >> |           this convention.
 >> 
 >> That maintains the case insensitive rule but provides a SHOULD on
 >> the preferred format of the upper case version. It doesn't say
 >> why they're "preferred" in this case so it could be quoted there
 >> purely for stylistic reasons. 
 >> 
 >> The drums ietf working group (revising rfc 821/822) don't cover
 >> this topic because their charter specifically excludes any
 >> consideration of mime. 
 >> 
 >> Cheers
 >> 
 >> Jim Hill
 >> 
-- 
Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>
Running Redhat Linux 5.1