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From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: An SMTP Question
Message-ID: <41377@think.Think.COM>
Date: 9 Aug 90 03:11:53 GMT
References: <9008061918.AA16065@gateway.mitre.org>
Sender: news@Think.COM
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Lines: 20

In article <9008061918.AA16065@gateway.mitre.org> rich@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG (Richard Verjinski) writes:
>The MIL-STD-1781 SMTP specification shows the BNF for an SMTP string on
>page 20. 
...
>From this information I think that it is safe to say that the NULL
>character can be passed as data, but must be preceded by the "\"
>character.

The original question was about mail data.  The BNF you referenced was for
the arguments to SMTP commands such as "RCPT TO:".  SMTP doesn't parse the
data after a DATA command; the only thing that has to be escaped there is a
line containing a single period.  In addition, if SMTP is being used to
transfer RPC-822 messages (the usual case) some of the header fields have
quoting requirements like the ones you described, but there are still no
restrictions on the message body.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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