Re: [Nmh-workers] A useless but interesting exercise: Design MH from scratch in the 2014 context

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Feb 22, 2014, at 21:43, Paul Vixie <address@hidden> wrote:

> all true. but there's a strong feeling among MH zealots, of whom i am
> one and which feeling i do share, that what gets written to
> $HOME/Mail/inbox/42 ought to be the raw BODY that came in over SMTP. 

But which SMTP?  The MTAs are already free to modify the transport encoding on 
the fly.  E.g., I submit an 8bit message to my local MTA.  It then forwards it 
to your local MTA, which only supports 7 bit ASCII, requiring my MTA to apply a 
transport encoding to the message before sending it to you.

Which of these two SMTP hops is the authoritative one you want reflected in the 
on-disk representation of the message?

--lyndon