Isaac Abraham said,
>> Yup. It is. Could someone please explain to me the difference between 7bit
>> and 8bit, when it comes to emails? I don't know what the difference is.
> Something about how when initially created, the email system used 7 bit to
> xfers messages from my machine to the other. The problem is when sending
> binary stuff
> (via MIME or UUEncode?), which is stored in 8bit fashion.
That's right to a point. email was originally designed for 7 bit, ASCII
codes up to 127. Base64/UUencoding is 7bit, because of that restriction.
MIME isn't an encoding method, it's a means of handling file
attachments. The MIME headers report the encoding used, the two main
ones being base64 and quoted-printable.
Where the 7/8 bit distinction comes in is with ASCII characters above
127, such as � (the pound sign). This mail was sent as pure 8 bit, if
it passed through a 7 bit mail server, the pound sign will be missing
from the previous sentence.
If you send mail that contains 8 bit characters and they "get lost" you
can encode as 7 bit. This is more efficient than base64 (which increases
mail size by 33%) but results in ugly characters appearing in non-MIME
mailers.
> So newer mail
> servers support 8bit mail which apparently is faster and better etc.. than
> old fashioned 7 bit mail.
It's better, but not faster.
> When you consider that initially email was only
> designed for transferring simple text messages, it's quite a neat workaround,
> because nowadays of course we use email for sending pictures and whatnot all
> the time.
It is convenient, but slow on large files because of the 33% overhead. I
suppose I should heed my own advice, having just mailed Chris to ask him
to mail me a 10MB file :-O
Neil
--
Neil Bothwick - http://www.wirenet.co.uk icq://16361788
Connected via Wirenet, The UK's first Amiga-only internet access provider
--
"Bother," said Pooh, as he said f**k in the wrong conference.
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