RFC 934 (rfc934) - Page 2 of 10
Proposed standard for message encapsulation
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 934 January 1985 Message Encapsulation forwarding can be thought of as encapsulating one or more messages inside another. Although this is useful for transfer of past correspondence to new recipients, without a decapsulation process (which this memo terms "bursting"), the forwarded messages are of little use to the recipients because they can not be distributed, forwarded, replied-to, or otherwise processed as separate individual messages. NOTE: RFC-822 mistakenly refers to distribution as forwarding (section 4.2). This memo suggests below, that these two activities can and should be the same. In the case of an interest group digest, a bursting capability is especially useful. Not only does the ability to burst a digest permit a recipient of the digest to reply to an individual digested message, but it also allows the recipient to selectively process the other messages encapsulated in the digest. For example, a single digest issue usually contains more than one topic. A subscriber may only be interested in a subset of the topics discussed in a particular issue. With a bursting capability, the subscriber can burst the digest, scan the headers, and process those messages which are of interest. The others can be ignored, if the user so desires. This memo is motivated by three concerns: In order to burst a message it is necessary to know how the component messages were encapsulated in the draft. At present there is no unambiguous standard for interest group digests. This memo proposes such a standard for the ARPA-Internet. Although interest group digests may appear to conform to a pseudo-standard, there is a serious ambiguity in the implementations which produce digests. By proposing this standard, the authors hope to solve this problem by specifically addressing the implementation ambiguity. Next, there is much confusion as to how "blind-carbon-copies" should be handled by UAs. It appears that each agent in the ARPA-Internet which supports a "bcc:" facility does so differently. Although this memo does not propose a standard for the generation of blind-carbon-copies, it introduces a formalism which views the "bcc:" facility as a special case of the forwarding activity. Finally, both forwarding and distribution can be accomplished with the same forwarding procedure, if a distributed message can be extracted as a separate individually processable message. With a proper bursting agent, it will be difficult to distinguish between Rose & Stefferud
