Editor's Note: Minutes received 8/4 CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by John Klensin/MIT Minutes of the Internet Mail Extensions Working Group (SMTPEXT) A copy of the working draft was published as an Internet Draft (draft-ietf-smtpext-8bittransport-05.txt) at the end of June, following an earlier version published about a month earlier. These two versions were of the character of ``tying up the loose ends'', since most significant issues had been resolved by the close of the San Diego meeting or in list discussion shortly thereafter. There was no discussion on the list between the time that draft was announced and the time of the Working Group meeting that would have implied protocol changes; the limited discussion that did occur focused on explanatory and specificity improvements to the document text. The Working Group meeting itself consequently was brief and quite focused, resolving the few remaining outstanding issues (about which there had been little disagreement and substantially no discussion), and then agreeing to recommend that IESG recommend a revised document as a Proposed Standard. The Working Group session also generated some informal discussions that led to further specific language in the document and some clarified features. A revised document version was prepared after the meeting and made available to Working Group participants both at the IETF and on the list, and comments on it resulted in some additional minor changes. Specific Issues addressed and resolved included: o Format and keywords for additional trace field information. After discussion of interactions with MIME body parts, the conclusion was to leave the level of detail at that specified prior to the San Diego meeting, relying on additional MIME headers to document per-body-part transformations. In summary, the trace information inserted by the transport in the message headers will document that a MIME transformation occurred and the specific changes made to individual body parts should be documented with those body parts. The Working Group strongly recommends that syntax, semantics, and requirements for the per-body-part audit documentation be added to MIME in the process of its going to draft standard. o Some additional tracing keywords were added to permit documenting the cases in which a transport agent or gateway performed a conversion to make an invalid message or address form valid. Tracing these activities may make it possible to identify and fix some of the historically-most-difficult problems with electronic mail. o Agreement was reached on additional clarification of the relationship of EHLO to commands and keywords not specified as part of either this enhanced protocol or RFC821. In summary, ``old'' 1 (RFC821-only) implementations are not expected to support EHLO at all, nor are they retroactively bound by any of the specific provisions of the enhanced protocol (although they are strongly encouraged to start registering keywords). Implementations that support the enhanced protocol and, hence, EHLO, must return keywords for all of the non-experimental commands that they provide, and all of those keywords must be registered. All experimental commands must start in ``X''; no keywords will be registered or otherwise specified that start in ``X''. o The requirement the EHLO return a LIMIT line (permitted message size information) was reaffirmed and explicitly documented. A new Internet Draft was submitted during the IETF meeting and has been published as draft-ietf-smtpext-8bittransport-06.txt. The Working Group recommends that the content of this draft be published as an RFC with ``Proposed Standard'' status. This concludes the present phase of the Working Group's work. Closing out the document at this point defers action on several outline proposals, discussed in the San Diego Minutes but never acted upon or proposed in any detail, for future efforts as the need arises. Attendees Robert Austein sra@epilogue.com Mark Baushke mdb@cisco.com Alan Clegg abc@concert.net James Conklin jbc@bitnic.educom.edu Ned Freed ned@innosoft.com Tony Genovese genovese@nersc.gov Paul Hill pbh@mit.edu Todd Kaehler kaehler@zk3.dec.com Neil Katin katin@eng.sun.com John Klensin klensin@infoods.mit.edu Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov Marjo Mercado marjo@cup.hp.com Keith Moore moore@cs.utk.edu Hank Nussbacher hank@vm.tau.ac.il Michael Patton map@lcs.mit.edu John Payne jop@wang.com Bradley Rhoades bdrhoades@mmc.mmmg.com Richard Schmalgemeier rgs@merit.edu Jane Smith jds@jazz.concert.net Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us John Wagner jwagner@princeton.edu 2