RFC 1911 (rfc1911) - Page 2 of 22

Voice Profile for Internet Mail

RFC 1911                   MIME Voice Profile              February 1996


   systems.

   The voice profile does not place limits on the use of additional
   media types or protocol options.  However, systems which are
   conformant to this profile should not send messages with features
   beyond this profile unless explicit per-destination configuration of
   these enhanced features is provided.  Such configuration information
   could be stored in a directory, though the implementation of this is
   a local matter.

   The following are typical limitations of voice messaging platform
   which were considered in creating this baseline profile.

      1) Text messages are not normally received and often cannot be
      displayed or viewed.  They can often be processed only via
      advanced text-to-speech or text-to-fax features not currently
      present in these machines.

      2) Voice mail machines usually act as an integrated Message
      Transfer Agent and a User Agent.  The voice mail machine is
      responsible for final delivery, and there is no relaying of
      messages.  RFC 822 header fields may have limited use in the
      context of the simple messaging features currently deployed.

      3) VM message stores are generally not capable of preserving the
      full semantics of an Internet message.  As such, use of a voice
      mail machine for general message forwarding and gatewaying is not
      supported.  Storage of "Received" lines and "Message-ID" may be
      limited.

      4) Nothing in this document precludes use of a general purpose
      email gateway from providing these services.  However, significant
      performance degradation may result if the email gateway does not
      support the ESMTP options recommended by this document.

      5) Internet-style mailing lists are not generally supported.
      Distribution lists are implemented as local alias lists.

      6) There is generally no human operator.  Error reports must be
      machine-parsable so that helpful responses can be given to users
      whose only access mechanism is a telephone.

      7) The system user names are often limited to 16 or fewer numeric
      characters.  Alpha characters are not generally used for mailbox
      identification as they cannot be easily entered from a telephone
      terminal.





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