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From: "Frank J. Wancho" 
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: RFC 934 - Message Encapsulation
Message-ID: <8168@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 9-Feb-85 18:45:44 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.8168
Posted: Sat Feb  9 18:45:44 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Feb-85 06:09:00 EST
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 30

Marshall,

Notwithstanding the relative merits of certain portions of this RFC, I
was rather surprised that you cited the lack of a standard format,
particularly the Encapsulation Boundary, as the primary motivation to
write this RFC in the first place.  There has been a de-facto standard
in use since the first digest appeared several years ago, and a
complementary UnDigestify command by Gail Zacharias (GZ@MC) for those
of us who use BABYL.  A couple of years ago, Mike Muuss (mike @BRL)
developed an UnDigestify for Unix/MMDF msg.  (There is even an option
to permit automatic detection and UnDigestification along with an
UnDo, just in case it guessed wrong.)  Whenever a new digest appears,
the moderator soon finds out whether or not the digest message was
formatted correctly.  Thus, although the original digests came first,
it has been those of us who have an UnDigestify command who tend to
"enforce" conformance to this "standard" format.

I suspect that had you asked, you would have been able to develop a
similar UnDigestify command for your mail handler instead of producing
yet another proposed standard that seems to ignore the existing one.

All of the above is not meant to say that the entire RFC is not
without merit.  There is something to be said in favor of the proposed
method of handling Bcc:s, Forwarded, and ReMailed messages, and the
implied extension of the UnDigestify command to handle the latter two
cases.  However, please don't overlook the fact that an extension to
an existing command has a better chance of being acceptable to the
community than a rewrite would...

--Frank