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Re: ZMailer 8BITMIME vs. Mercury



On Tue, 23 Aug 1994, Scott Schwartz wrote:

> What's the point of zmailer rewriting messages?  I'd much prefer if my
> MTA just passed messages with no change whatsoever.  That's simple,
> safe, and easy to understand.  The MUA can do mime or whatever else the
> user wants.

    Read RFC 1652.  When ZMailer or any mailer with 8BITMIME support is
presented with a message with 8BIT Content-Transfer-Encoding which it is
to pass to another MTA which does not support 8BITMIME, it has two options
-- one of which is to rewrite the message to convert 8-bit data to its
equivalent 7-bit form, or the other is to simply bounce the message as
undeliverable.
    I think you would agree that the second option is not desirable.  Yes,
there are MUAs which do all the conversion from 8 to 7 bits for you, such
as Pine which I have used for these messages, but a lot of people do not
like to see the 7-bit Quoted-Printable encoding for 8-bit data.  Q-P
should be considered a temporary hack for those mailers which do not yet
have complete 8-bit transparency, and ideally, in time, all mailers will
be truly 8-bit-clean and speak 8BITMIME (and eventually, BINARYMIME).


hacker Barry Bouwsma, MIME: <barryb@ccsun.tuke.sk>  ASCII: <ag786@yfn.ysu.edu>
Zürich, Switzerland