Re: [9fans] ACME mail

["Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

binary (8-bit) mail seems to be less of a problem
than actually parsing and handling utf-8.
/bin/mail (mailx?) on most unix systems
still can't handle even mime, i gather.  pine complains
every time it gets a utf-8 message (warning!
i don't know that character set.  how about i 
pretend it's us-ascii?)  i know that other unix programs
had the same problems.  until presotto added
the us-ascii hack to marshal, i got a fair number of
complaints from people about my sending them
``uppity'' mail.

the nice thing about upas/fs and marshal is that
they handles all the ugly conversion so that 
nedmail and acme Mail are much easier to
write.  everyone who implements mime does
what they need to get by (even us).  unix authors
each have to roll their own mime parser and character
set converter, so the set of ``what they need to get
by'' differs from mailer to mailer and is a bit
frustrating.