[Email-SIG] fixing the current email module

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

R. David Murray writes:
 > I have set up two more documents on the wiki.  One is UseCases[1], [...].
 > The other is a Glossary[2].

Thank you, very much!

 > I think most of it accurately reflects the consensus here, but in
 > it I'm proposing to use the term 'transfer-decoded' for #3, and
 > 'transfer-encoded' as an alternative to 'wire-format' just for
 > symmetry.  Comments and suggestions welcome.

'Wire-format' means "you can cat it to the wire", ie, RFC-conforming
(in fact, it's the only meaning in the RFCs by definition), and for
email itself it's always bytes AFAIK (Mama don' 'low no XML roun'
here, Lord, Lord!).  That's not true of all our applications, though,
especially stuff like doctests.  There are also some RFCs we use such
as BASE64 (specifically relevant to transfer encodings) that are
defined in terms of characters, not bytes, so 'transfer-encoded' is
slightly different from 'wire-format'.

I think in general that kind of comment should be applied directly to
the Glossary, but what deserves general discussion is "how pedantic do
we want to be?  I think the distinction made here between 'wire-format'
and 'transfer-encoded' is useful *to us*, and in general lean toward
"high pedantry" (cf how much smoke and how little fire Glenn and I are
generating!)  WDOT?