Is ASCII 0 valid in a message body?

[Julio Polo <julio@hawaii.edu>]

This line is from an "inbox" mail file (wherever "mailbox" delivers mail)

fax:  55 5 5555555From coombs.anu.edu.au!owner-pacific-islands-l Sun Jul 23...
                 ^^
Note how the message from coombs.anu.edu.au starts on the same line as the
end of the previous message.  I'm guessing a NUL character (ASCII 0) was
at the end of the previous message, which in UNIX means end of input/file/etc.
This often happens with mail coming from auckland.ac.nz and sent with Pegasus 
Mail/Mac.  It causes most mail user agents (Pine, MM) to misparse the mail file
and display two messages as one, or sometimes skip all messages after that 
altogether.

Questions:

1) What range of ASCII characters are allowed in the body of a message 
   sent via SMTP?

2) Has anyone else experienced this?  How are you handling it?

Thanks.

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Julio Polo                                  University of Hawaii
                                            Information Technology Services
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