RFC 3030 (rfc3030) - Page 1 of 12

SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages

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Network Working Group                                       G. Vaudreuil
Request for Comments: 3030                           Lucent Technologies
Obsolete: 1830                                             December 2000
Category: Standards Track


                        SMTP Service Extensions
                       for Transmission of Large
                        and Binary MIME Messages

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This memo defines two extensions to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
   Protocol) service.  The first extension enables a SMTP client and
   server to negotiate the use of an alternative to the DATA command,
   called "BDAT", for efficiently sending large MIME (Multipurpose
   Internet Mail Extensions) messages.  The second extension takes
   advantage of the BDAT command to permit the negotiated sending of
   MIME messages that employ the binary transfer encoding.  This
   document is intended to update and obsolete RFC 1830.

Working Group Summary

   This protocol is not the product of an IETF working group, however
   the specification resulted from discussions within the ESMTP working
   group.  The resulting protocol documented in RFC 1830 was classified
   as experimental at that time due to questions about the robustness of
   the Binary Content-Transfer-Encoding deployed in then existent MIME
   implementations.  As MIME has matured and other uses of the Binary
   Content-Transfer-Encoding have been deployed, these concerns have
   been allayed.  With this document, Binary ESMTP is expected to become
   standards-track.







Vaudreuil                   Standards Track
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