On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 10:29:14AM -0800, Barry Caplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote a message of 23 lines which said:
> Actually, it is not Unicode which is nt mature enough. It is SMTP, > the core mail transport protocol. It is not 8 bit clean. It is very > clear in the RFCs that only 7bit data is allowed "over the wire". I have to correct this because it may seriously cast doubts about the ability of Internet email to send Unicode files. > There are various extensions and kluges described in various RFCs > (ESMTP, MIME, etc. ) All these extensions are referenced in the same RFC, 2821, which is the authoritative one about SMTP. I do not know any mainstream SMTP server which does not implement them. The most important for us is 8BITMIME: Eight-bit message content transmission MAY be requested of the server by a client using extended SMTP facilities, notably the "8BITMIME" extension [20]. 8BITMIME SHOULD be supported by SMTP servers. > but they are not universally implemented at the server transport > layer, This is absolutely wrong. sendmail, Postfix and qmail allow 8-bits transport for a *very* long time. > But for arbitrary email from one address to another, you can't rely on it. I send Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) emails for more than ten years (and without using quoted-printable or other similar hacks) to French-speaking people in various parts of the world and I'm still waiting for an actual problem.
