Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:47:47 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> Cc: Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@bellavista.cz>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Find abandoned packages Message-ID: <20021125214747.GB667@gothmog.gr> In-Reply-To: <tpfztp8m6a.ztp@localhost.localdomain> References: <000801c2915e$be8907c0$6400a8c0@windows> <9eel9eaber.l9e@localhost.localdomain> <20021125091339.GR77198@freepuppy.bellavista.cz> <tpfztp8m6a.ztp@localhost.localdomain>
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On 2002-11-25 11:49, "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> wrote: > Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@bellavista.cz> writes: > > Actually, it's not non-ASCII characters or MSFT products that causes > > problems. It's fucked up mail clients that send messages that > > fallaciously claim to be using charset X when they're really in Y. > > > > Incidentally, these mail clients are MSFT products. > > Please correct me if you really know better (I'm no email expert), but > I'm fairly sure that e-mail is still supposed to be "7-bit clean" so it > can go (without encoding/decoding) through 7-bit lines (maybe with > parity on the 8th line), etc. Or has this been officially changed? Partly true. Mail servers, at least those who conform to the established standards, go at great lengths to maintain compatibility with their peers that do not support the full range of 8-bit ASCII. It is also true though, that flawed mail clients can push down into the connection to their outgoing SMTP server messages that do not have proper headers to allow the server to parse and convert the 8-bit characters correctly. This is often cause by either a) bugs in the mail client software, or b) misconfigured clients. Outlook is infamous for its habit of sending 8-bit characters unencoded in MIME messages that lack proper Content-Type: headers. The result is rather interesting to look upon, when the message passes through multiple SMTP servers, with different settings each. > As for HTML/MIME, I don't know if MIME supports the encoding of > non-7-bit HTML characters into 7-bit code, or if it expects > 7-bit-clean HTML. MIME supports anything. 7-bit US ASCII characters. 8-bit characters in a multitude of encodings and character sets. Even UTF8 or Unicode. MIME itself doesn't dictate anything about the way a client handles the representation of the characters that are shown to the user. It only defines a standard way of converting and encoding these in a smaller character set, that is guaranteed to be easy to transmit over links that support ASCII. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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