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From: peltz@cerl.uiuc.edu (Steve Peltz)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Re: COMPRESSING of binary data into mailable ASCII
Message-ID: <1991Mar28.194630.16749@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 91 19:46:30 GMT
References: <12485@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1991Mar26.233839.24835@nntp-server.caltech.edu> <12496@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
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In article <12496@pt.cs.cmu.edu> tgl@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) writes:
>The '.' business and EBCDIC compatibility are the only other constraints
>I know about.

Although, as you point out, a '.' at the beginning isn't forbidden, it might
be best to avoid it simply to keep broken implementations from messing it
up.

Another possible constraint would be with a line that starts with "From". This
often gets translated to ">From" (and even variants in case sometimes get
translated). That's being overzealous in most cases (my mailer only treats
a line that begins with "From ", including the trailing space, as being a
message separator, and plenty of systems don't even care about that.
--
Steve Peltz
Internet: peltz@cerl.uiuc.edu	PLATO/NovaNET: peltz/s/cerl