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

6.21.3.2. Message/rfc822

6.21.3.2.  Message/rfc822
   The Content-Type "message/rfc822" should be used for the
   encapsulation (whether as part of another news article or, more
   usually, as part of a mail message) of complete news articles which
   have already been posted to Netnews and which are for the information
   of the recipient, and do not constitute a request to repost them.

   In the case where the encapsulated article has Content-Transfer-
   Encoding "8bit", it will be necessary to change that encoding if it
   is to be forwarded over some mail transport that only supports
   "7bit". However, this should not be necessary for any mail transport
   that supports the 8BITMIME feature [SMTP].  Moreover, where the
   headers of the encapsulated article contain any UTF8-xtra-chars
   (2.4), it may not be possible to transport them over mail transports
   even where 8BITMIME is supported. In such cases, it will be necessary
   to encode those headers as provided in [RFC 2047] (notwithstanding
   that such usage is deprecated for news headers by this standard, and
   actually forbidden in the case of the Newsgroups header).

   In the event that the encapsulated article has to be encoded for
   either of these reasons, it may be necessary to reverse that encoding
   if certain forms of digital signatures have been employed, or if the
   article is to be reintroduced into some Netnews system (however, in
   the latter case, the Content-Type "application/news-transmission"
   should have been used instead).

        NOTE: It is likely, though not guaranteed, that headers
        containing UTF8-xtra-chars will pass safely through mail
        transports supporting 8BITMIME if the "message/rfc822" object is
        sent as an attachment (i.e.  as a part of a multipart) rather
        than as the top-level body of the mail message. Moreover, it is
        anticipated that future extensions to the mail standards will
        permit headers containing UTF8-xtra-chars to be carried without
        further ado over conforming transports.
[In fact, of current transports supporting 8BITMIME, only sendmail will
have problems with UTF-8 in top-level headers.]

See also previous draft (03): 6.17.3.2. Message/rfc822
See also previous draft (02):
See also previous draft (son-of-1036):
See also previous draft (rfc-1036):