Re: No MIME

[John Gardiner Myers <jgm+@CMU.EDU>]

Dave Rhodes <Barry.Bouwsma@tuke.sk> writes:
>     Thus, we come to the reason behind this excessively long post.  I've
> posted this to the MIME group in case some generous soul there happens to
> want to take a look at zmailer and offer the code needed for it to perform
> the complete 8BITMIME conversion for all parts of a message.  My guess is
> that it shouldn't be too difficult, as top-level conversion is implemented
> adequately.

Generalized 8bit to 7bit MIME conversion is actually rather tricky.
The general problem is the MTA is being a gateway--it has to take
anything (including arbitrary syntactically invalid crap) as input and
not screw up anything that is legal.  There are a lot of of little
annoying details, and if you miss one, you're going to be munging
messages and generally wreaking havoc.

Widespread 8bit to 7bit conversion scares the heck out of me--if an
MTA with broken conversion code gets widespread deployment, havoc will
reign for quite some time.

I've been giving Eric Allman some advice about sendmail's 8.7's
conversion code.  The current alpha version (which isn't generally
available) still has some problems, but there has been great
improvement since earlier alpha versions and I'm starting to get
optimistic.  The code is certainly much further along than the code I
saw in zmailer a few versions back.

I think the best thing for zmailer would be to wait for sendmail 8.7,
and then adapt sendmail's conversion code.

-- 
_.John G. Myers		Internet: jgm+@CMU.EDU
			LoseNet:  ...!seismo!ihnp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!give!up