[ietf-dkim] 8bit downgrades

[Michael Thomas]

On 05/19/2011 07:20 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> Can anyone remember why there's a SHOULD for the downgrade to 7-bit in
>> RFC4871 Section 5.3, rather than a MUST?  The likelihood of breakage is
>> so high when sending 8-bit data that DKIM almost becomes pointless
>> without the upgrade.
>>      
> I think Pete's analysis is correct, but my advice would be to take
> it out altogether.  We don't have any great insight into the warts
> of what paths are likely to downcode a message and what paths aren't,
> so I would prefer not to purport to offer advice about it.
>    

Miracles... my implementation never bothered to worry about
that SHOULD and I don't feel dirty about it in the least: it
never made any difference that I could determine. This
was mostly an academic piece of advice, IMO. Since dev
managers literally looks at MUST's and SHOULD and ignore
MAY's to determine what gets implemented, this is not
quite as academic.

Mike