From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Nov 25 13:48:15 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2E77637B401 for ; Mon, 25 Nov 2002 13:48:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from mailsrv.otenet.gr (mailsrv.otenet.gr [195.170.0.5]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C14D43EAF for ; Mon, 25 Nov 2002 13:48:11 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: from gothmog.gr (patr530-a080.otenet.gr [212.205.215.80]) by mailsrv.otenet.gr (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id gAPLloYj012131; Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:47:51 +0200 (EET) Received: from gothmog.gr (gothmog [127.0.0.1]) by gothmog.gr (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id gAPLloLM001434; Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:47:50 +0200 (EET) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: (from keramida@localhost) by gothmog.gr (8.12.6/8.12.6/Submit) id gAPLlm61001433; Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:47:48 +0200 (EET) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:47:47 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas To: "Gary W. Swearingen" Cc: Roman Neuhauser , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Find abandoned packages Message-ID: <20021125214747.GB667@gothmog.gr> References: <000801c2915e$be8907c0$6400a8c0@windows> <9eel9eaber.l9e@localhost.localdomain> <20021125091339.GR77198@freepuppy.bellavista.cz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 2002-11-25 11:49, "Gary W. Swearingen" wrote: > Roman Neuhauser 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