Re: mx.gnus.org being very strict

[Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

> This goes back to the summer of 1993 when I read the MIME standard,
> and started using quoted-printable in emails, on an infrastructure that
> consisted of sendmails universally patched to do just-send-8, and a
> silently agreement that the charset used should be latin-1.
>
> Suffice to say the feedback I got from people receiving
> quoted-unreadable was so _universally_ negative, that I quickly
> stopped doing it.  In the eyes of others, things just worked, and I
> broke them.

Virtually every MUA talks MIME today, several MTAs (among them sendmail)
and MDAs (among them maildrop) and filters have options to convert
quoted-printable text/* to 8bit text/*.

What may have been an issue in the time when everyone was using Berkeley
"mail" and perhaps elm, is not an issue today. 8BITMIME set off as a
standard to smooth the transition from 7bit to 8bit, the ultimate goal
would have been that every MTA supported 8BITMIME (which may, BTW, be
implemented as returning to the sender an 8BITMIME mail that would have
been to be sent to a 7bit destination).

DJB was the first [name lacks here] to deliberately throw his sabot into
the gears, breaking the whole idea of having 8BITMIME
transitional. qmail as a gateway will happily trash mail. I still
occasionally receive mail with d or | where a German Umlaut should have
been, which proves that there are still 7bit systems in use with systems
that just-send-eight.

> So one thing I never would do, would be to set up an MTA to reject
> messages that has 8 bit, but no MIME.  I can't imaging what kind of
> standards-obsessed narrowmindedness would make anyone do so.

Yay. How does the recipient know the character set?

Norway may not face the ambiguity because virtually everything fits, but
for instance France (cœur is ISO-8859-15), Germany, Finland (Z charon,
€) suffer from the confusion whether an 8bit text is ISO-8859-1, -15,
Windows-1252 or UTF-8. Heuristics or "conventions" don't apply. The
introduction of the Euro symbol about five years ago broke the
assumption that a mail or news was in ISO-8859-1 character set.

There are means to transport that character set information.
These means are called MIME.

If the admin determines he doesn't want to relay mail lacking such
information, or information that it is 8bit content counter to what
RFC-2822 says, then that is a wise one, is a perfectly legal one (he has
the power to set his system's policies) and has my sympathy.

Given that the relay was pretty early in the delivery chain, it was the
sender who got his mail back right away - and that's where strictness
and being conservative have to apply.

-- 
Matthias Andree

Encrypted mail welcome: my GnuPG key ID is 0x052E7D95