From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 15:29:11 CDT
At 21:53 +0200 2005/05/17, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>The default channel in SMTP is only 7-bits wide, for historical
>reasons. Almost all the SMTP servers, for many, many years, accept to
>properly carry 8-bits data (wether UTF-8 or else). See RFC 2821, "2.4
>General Syntax Principles and Transaction Model".
When 8-bit mail servers started to appear in the beginning of the
1990'ies, it probed difficult to ensure that all servers the mail was
passed through were 8-bit. Thus, using an 8-bit character encoding,
the mail frequently got corrupted. Therefore, people switched to
MIME, which encodes 8-bit data into 7-bit data. That situation seem
to remain.
One should find a method to kill of any mail servers that still
zeroes out the 8'th bit. Then one can send UTF-8 mail without using
MIME.
-- Hans Aberg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 17 2005 - 15:30:03 CDT