From: Dean Harding (dean.harding@dload.com.au)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 18:10:11 CDT
Almost all mail servers I've ever encountered (at least, those that support
the ESMTP protocol) support the 8BITMIME extension (see
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1652.html) which lets you send 8-bit
MIME-encoded data. (By the way, you'd generally still need to send messages
encoded as MIME whether you're sending it as 7-bit or 8-bit).
Personally, I've never bothered using the extension, because it means you
have to query the MTA you're sending to before you can encode your message
to see if it accept 8-bit MIME messages. I've always just found it's
simpler to encode the message using a 7-bit scheme and forget about 8-bit
(after all, you need to write the 7-bit fall-back method anyway).
I guess that's why 7-bit isn't going to go away: people like me are too lazy
:)
Dean.
-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
Behalf Of Hans Aberg
Sent: Wednesday, 18 May 2005 6:29 am
To: Stephane Bortzmeyer
Cc: faraz siddiqi; unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: SMTP and unicode
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 - 18:13:15 CDT