Details
-
Task
-
Status: Open
-
Major
-
Resolution: Unresolved
-
0.6
-
None
-
None
Description
By round tripping, I mean parsing some MIME document into a fully decomposed form and then recreating a new version of the document from this form.
In theory, Mime4J decomposition and recomposition could be made perfect with no loss of information. In other words, given a MIME document, the parser could completely decompose the document and a bitwise identical copy could be recomposed.
In practice, the limits of support are questionable. Some limitations may be expedient. For example, perhaps comments and encoding of ASCII characters are not sufficiently important to be worth preserving. Other limitations may arise from MIME documents which are not strictly compliant with the specification - for example, the use of unescaped non-ASCII characters in MIME headers may mean that the output would need to be escaped to ensure compliance.
It is important to define and describe the limits of round tripping so that users and developers are clear about the level of support MIme4J claims. In addition, sufficient unit tests should be created to ensure in confidence that documents within these limits are correctly handled.
Attachments
Issue Links
- is related to
-
MIME4J-34 o.a.j.m.message.Header#writeTo violates RFC 822
-
- Closed
-
- relates to
-
MIME4J-113 [SMIME and OpenPGP/MIME] Support For Canonicalication And Normalisation
-
- Open
-