Samuel W. Heywood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Mon, 18 Oct
1999 00:00:03 +0000:
>In the case of my own ISP, the messages are truncated when the
>server finds a period being the first character of a line of
>text, even though many other characters follow on the same
>line.
The specifications for SMTP require that:
(a) the sequence CR,LF,period,CR,LF ends the data part of an
upload/download (RFC 821, section 3.1), and
(b) a line starting with a period can be transmitted properly by
doubling the period (i.e. the line then starts with "..").
The receiver software is expected to remove the added period
during downloading of the mail. This technique is called
"transparency" (RFC 821, section 4.5.2).
As most ISPs are using the same standard software ("sendmail" or
a similar package) which implements SMTP correctly, the error
most probably lies with your e-mail client which has to handle
the "transparency issue" as per RFC 821. (The user should never
have to bother about this. It is something that your mail client
should do during the upload/download automatically.)
>This is a problem for me sometimes when I try to send UUENCODE
>attachments. UUENCODE.EXE will sometimes encode the file so
>that sometimes a line of text might begin with a period; ...
It would be the job of your mail client to properly handle such a
line according to RFC 821, section 4.5.2.
- Wolfgang Redtenbacher
(author of commercial e-mail software)
---------------------------------------------------------
Redtenbacher Software Tel.: +49 7159 17046
Roemerstr. 11/1 Fax: +49 7159 17047
D-71272 Renningen e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: www.redtenbacher.de
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