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Date:      Thu, 19 Dec 1996 11:26:08 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        roberto@keltia.freenix.fr (Ollivier Robert)
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 8-bit characters in gecos field
Message-ID:  <199612191826.LAA11873@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <Mutt.19961219072900.roberto@keltia.freenix.fr> from "Ollivier Robert" at Dec 19, 96 07:29:00 am

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> According to David Nugent:
> > Perhaps our ports can be patched to do q-p translation if they
> > don't already? Most imap2bis servers support MIME in any case.
> 
> Automatic conversion is not always a good idea. The PGP/MIME future
> standard encodes somethings in QP when signing in order to preserve
> characters and converting them means that you lose the signature.

The signature is encapsulating data.  You could make the same argument
about byte-stuffing the '.' at the front of lines to make sure a naked
'.' not intended as a DATA state terminator was not seen as such.

The point of fact is that the quoting is reversed when the data leaves
the RFC821 transport encapsulation.

Issues of ^">From" and ^" From" conversion of ^"From" are an issue
of the local MDA (Mail Delivery Agent), and are only a problem if
the MDA (incorrectly) dumps all mail in a single file so that the
^"From" is used (also incorrectly) as a message seperator.

Which is to say, the message body should be unaltered after being
unquoted following quoting for transport.


The same arguments apply to a quoting "fingerd" and an unquoting "finger".


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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