On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > If you only have UTF-8 files you don't need to do anything. If you
> > communicate with other planets (and this message indicates you do :-)
>
> your message was sent:
> "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII"
> which could be considered a utf-8 sub-set.
> Admittedly, sendmail's hangups with the eighth bit make
> sending clear utf-8 documents somewhat unreliable.
What's wrong with sendmail? Is your machine one of few remaining
machines running antique sendmail 5.x or sendmail 4.x? Sendmail has
been 8bit-clean since 8.6.x. Sendmail 8.7.x or higher is strictly
compliant to STD 10/RFC 821 and RFC 1652 (ESMTP extension) and RFC 2045.
If correctly configured, it sends out 8BITMIME messages if it's certain
that the other end of the communication can receive 8BITMIME. Compliant
to RFC 1652, it asks whether or not the other side of the link can
understand 8BITMIME and sends out 8BITMIME if the answer is positive.
Otherwise (i.e the other side is either 8bit clean but not compliant to RFC
1652 or not 8bit clean like totally outdated sendmail 4.x/5.x), again
__compliant to_ RFC 1652, it falls back to quoted-printable or base64.
It's stupid and/or non-standard-compliant MUAs/MTAs like Outlook
Express and qmail/smail (qmail/smail violated RFC 1652 a few years ago
when I checked. my apology if they've changed their behavior since)
that have to be blame for sending always base64 or blindly sending
8bitmime without checking the other side's ability.
> Email
> is one embarrasing case where it may take awhile for the
> infrastructure to catch up. (putting all text email in a
> base-64 mime attachment can be said to suck)
It doesn't have to be a MIME _attachment_. C-T-E of RFC 822 body can
be Base64/QP as well as in 7bit/8bit.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
or
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
is as good as
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> Does anyone know offhand what other barriers remain to
> sending email as raw utf-8?
Why would you bother whether C-T-E is base64/quoted-printable or 8bit?
If your MUA(mail user agent) can't cope with MIME, it's time for you to
consider switching to a *modern* MIME-compliant MUA.
Besides, sendmail can convert back qp/base64 encoded _single_part
messages back to 8bitmime messages before delivering them to local
mailboxes.
Jungshik
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
