INTERNET-DRAFT                               Charles H. Lindsey
Usenet Format Working Group                  University of Manchester
                                             April 2001

6.21.3.1. Message/partial

6.21.3.1.  Message/partial
   The Content-Type "message/partial" MAY be used to split a long news
   article into several smaller ones, but this usage is discouraged on
   the grounds that modern transport agents should have no difficulty in
   handling articles of arbitrary length.

   However, IF this feature is used, then the "id" parameter SHOULD be
   in the form of a unique message identifier (but different from that
   in the Message-ID header of any of the parts).  Contrary to the
   requirements specified in [RFC 2046], the Transfer-Encoding SHOULD be
   set to "8bit" at least in each part that requires it. The second and
   subsequent parts SHOULD contain References headers referring to all
   the previous parts, thus enabling reading agents with threading
   capabilities to present them in the correct order. Reading agents MAY
   then provide a facility to recombine the parts into a single article
   (but this standard does not require them to do so).

See also previous draft (03): 6.17.3.1. Message/partial
See also previous draft (02):
See also previous draft (son-of-1036):
See also previous draft (rfc-1036):