CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Greg Vaudreuil/CNRI SMTPEXT Minutes This meeting began as a Birds of a Feather session called by Phill Gross (CNRI) to discuss two SMTP related proposals. Jan Michael Rynning (NORDUnet) and Johnny Eriksson (NORDUnet), participating by telephone, presented a method for transmitting eight bit character sets over SMTP. A proposal for a standard List-Service syntax for the Internet was made by Greg Vaudreuil (CNRI). The discussion broadened a bit and resulted in the formation of a Working Group to consider enhancements to SMTP and RFC 822 to allow for body parts. Rynning's and Eriksson's proposal suggested a mechanism to transmit 8 bit character sets through SMTP. The proposal consisted of: o Eliminating the 7bit restriction in SMTP, and in cases where 8 bit SMTP is not implemented, o Proposing a 7 bit encoding for non-8 bit systems called TEX-HEX. TEX-HEX is a mixture of plain ASCII TEXT and HEX encoded characters. The group found the proposal interesting, but primarily as a starting point for a re-examination of several SMTP issues. There was a consensus that the group should work to eliminate the 7 bit and 1000 character per line restrictions in SMTP. This will allow easier sending of binary files. Tom Kessler (SUN) convinced the group that there were only minor code changes required for sendmail to accept 8 bit ASCII. Kessler further volunteered to author a document describing the changes to the SMTP protocol. A command ``EBIT'' was proposed in the document by Rynning and Eriksson to identify new mailers. The group agreed that this extension should be considered for SMTP. An alternate HELO command could be defined to query a mailer for 8 bit compatibility, such as HELO8. The Working Group looked at RFC 1154 for defining encodings of specific body parts. Some felt that the document has short-comings in not differentiating between content and the encoding scheme. Greg Vaudreuil took an action to contact the author to inquire about the state of that document. The Working Group felt that establishing body parts for 822 mail would be a good thing. An outstanding issue remained concerning the interaction between the various encoding schemes as the 7 or 8 bit transmission systems. 1 Rynning and Eriksson took an action to re-write their proposal for TEX-HEX as a specific encoding and body part to be used with the encoding document. John Veizades (Apple) stopped in to brief the group about Unicos, a universal text encoding scheme developed at Zerox and Apple. This scheme used two octets to represent all known characters. Chris Myers (WashU) explained the list service offered by Washington University, and explained many of the features of Bitnet's ListServ. Myers took an action to distribute the listserv document to those in the group who had an interest. The group did not come to a consensus on whether to pursue this topic at this time. Actions Kessler Write a document amending RFC 821 to eliminate the line length restriction and the 7 bit restriction. Vaudreuil Determine the state of RFC 1154, and encourage the author to join in this effort. Eriksson/Rynning Rewrite the TEX HEX encoding document as a specific instance of an RFC 1154 body part. Attendees Robert Braden braden@venera.isi.edu Cyrus Chow cchow@orion.arc.nasa.gov Johnny Eriksson bygg@sunet.se Phillip Gross pgross@nri.reston.va.us Russell Hobby rdhobby@ucdavis.edu Tom Kessler kessler@sun.com Chris Myers chris@wugate.wustl.edu Brad Parker brad@cayman.com Michael Roberts roberts@educom.edu Jan Michael Rynning jmr@nada.kth.se Bernhard Stockman boss@sunet.se Dean Throop throop@dg-rtp.dg.com Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us David Zimmerman dpz@dimacs.rutgers.edu 2