Technical Summary
This document defines an extension to the SMTP service (8BITMIME)
whereby an SMTP content body consisting of text containing octets
outside of the US-ASCII octet range (hex 00-7F) may be relayed using
SMTP.
Working Group Summary
The YAM WG adopted a two-step approach to move this document to Full
Standard. The first step was a pre-evaluation of the existing
specification to identify changes and non-changes. The YAM WG
requested feedback from the IESG on those decisions. The second step
was to incorporate the changes into the document and ensure that any
implementation that conforms to the Draft Standard version of the
specification remains compliant with this document. There was no
controversy. There is consensus to move the specification to Full
Standard.
Document Quality
The document has a high degree of technical maturity. In the 16
years since publication, this specification has become an integral
part of all professional SMTP software products and is widely
supported in Internet Mail operations. Ned Freed rewrote part of the
text in Section 3 as the Draft Standard version was published prior
to the introduction of key words to indicate requirement levels.
Personnel
S. Moonesamy is the Document Shepherd for this document. Alexey
Melnikov is the Responsible Area Director.
RFC Editor Notes
1) Please replace the Section 5 (Security Considerations) to read:
This RFC does not discuss security issues and is not is not believed to
raise any security issues not already endemic in electronic mail and
present in fully conforming implementations of [RFC5321], including
attacks facilitated by the presence of an option negotiation mechanism.
Since MIME semantics are transport neutral the 8BITMIME option
provides no added capability to disseminate malware than is provided
by unextended 7bit SMTP.
2) Please change the section "6.2. Acknowledgements" to be a top level
section.