Re: digests and MIME

[Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no> writes:
> For all I know, it may be my screwed-up sendmail config that messes
> things up...  No, wait, it can't be, because my machine doesn't touch
> mail that goes through ifi.  Let's see...  The sendmail at ifi *will*
> encode things that "need" encoding, unless there already is a
> "Mime-version: 1.0" header in there.  Perhaps it doesn't like those
> "Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.94)" headers?  Does the
> MIME standard allow that?


My reading of the RFC's suggests that it does allow it.  Here is an
excerpt from RFC 1521, which seems to be the one that applies in this
case:

[begin excerpt]

   Therefore, this document defines a new header field, "MIME-Version",
   which is to be used to declare the version of the Internet message
   body format standard in use.

   Messages composed in accordance with this document MUST include such
   a header field, with the following verbatim text:

   MIME-Version: 1.0

   The presence of this header field is an assertion that the message
   has been composed in compliance with this document.

   Since it is possible that a future document might extend the message
   format standard again, a formal BNF is given for the content of the
   MIME-Version field:

   version := "MIME-Version" ":" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT

[..snip..]

   NOTE TO IMPLEMENTORS: All header fields defined in this document,
   including MIME-Version, Content-type, etc., are subject to the
   general syntactic rules for header fields specified in RFC 822.  In
   particular, all can include comments, which means that the following
   two MIME-Version fields are equivalent:

                    MIME-Version: 1.0
                    MIME-Version: 1.0 (Generated by GBD-killer 3.7)

[end excerpt]


The Mime-version field was first defined in RFC 1341.  I didn't find
any more recent RFC's, overriding the header definition given here.

(Of couse, the sendmail at ifi might not have been taught to ignore
comments in the Mime-version header.)

-- 
 Jacob Morzinski                                jmorzins@mit.edu