Voice Profile for Internet Mail
RFC 1911
Document | Type |
RFC - Experimental
(February 1996; No errata)
Was draft-umig-mime-voice (individual)
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Author | Gregory Vaudreuil | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 1911 (Experimental) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group G. Vaudreuil Request for Comments: 1911 Octel Network Services Category: Experimental February 1996 Voice Profile for Internet Mail Status of this Memo This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. 1. Abstract A class of special-purpose computers has evolved to provide voice messaging services. These machines generally interface to a telephone switch and provide call answering and voice messaging services. Traditionally, messages sent to a non-local machine are transported using analog networking protocols based on DTMF signaling and analog voice playback. As the demand for networking increases, there is a need for a standard high-quality digital protocol to connect these machines. The following document is a profile of the Internet standard MIME and ESMTP protocols for use as a digital voice networking protocol. This profile is based on an earlier effort in the Audio Message Interchange Specification (AMIS) group to define a voice messaging protocol based on X.400 technology. This protocol is intended to satisfy the user requirements statement from that earlier work with the industry standard ESMTP/MIME mail protocol infrastructures already used within corporate internets. This profile will be called the voice profile in this document. 2. Scope and Design Goals MIME is the Internet multipurpose, multimedia messaging standard. This document explicitly recognizes its capabilities and provides a mechanism for the exchange of various messaging technologies including voice and facsimile. This document specifies a profile of the TCP/IP multimedia messaging protocols for use by special-purpose voice processing platforms. These platforms have historically been special-purpose computers and often do not have facilities normally associated with a traditional Internet Email-capable computer. This profile is intended to specify the minimum common set of features and functionally for conformant Vaudreuil Experimental [Page 1] RFC 1911 MIME Voice Profile February 1996 systems. The voice profile does not place limits on the use of additional media types or protocol options. However, systems which are conformant to this profile should not send messages with features beyond this profile unless explicit per-destination configuration of these enhanced features is provided. Such configuration information could be stored in a directory, though the implementation of this is a local matter. The following are typical limitations of voice messaging platform which were considered in creating this baseline profile. 1) Text messages are not normally received and often cannot be displayed or viewed. They can often be processed only via advanced text-to-speech or text-to-fax features not currently present in these machines. 2) Voice mail machines usually act as an integrated Message Transfer Agent and a User Agent. The voice mail machine is responsible for final delivery, and there is no relaying of messages. RFC 822 header fields may have limited use in the context of the simple messaging features currently deployed. 3) VM message stores are generally not capable of preserving the full semantics of an Internet message. As such, use of a voice mail machine for general message forwarding and gatewaying is not supported. Storage of "Received" lines and "Message-ID" may be limited. 4) Nothing in this document precludes use of a general purpose email gateway from providing these services. However, significant performance degradation may result if the email gateway does not support the ESMTP options recommended by this document. 5) Internet-style mailing lists are not generally supported. Distribution lists are implemented as local alias lists. 6) There is generally no human operator. Error reports must be machine-parsable so that helpful responses can be given to users whose only access mechanism is a telephone. 7) The system user names are often limited to 16 or fewer numeric characters. Alpha characters are not generally used for mailbox identification as they cannot be easily entered from a telephone terminal. Vaudreuil Experimental [Page 2] RFC 1911 MIME Voice Profile February 1996 It is a goal of this effort to make as few restrictions and additionsShow full document text