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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!caip!think!husc6!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!decwrl!sun!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.bugs,net.mail,net.internat
Subject: "Binary"/international text in mail
Message-ID: <1209@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Mon, 20-Oct-86 20:14:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1209
Posted: Mon Oct 20 20:14:56 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Oct-86 01:27:27 EDT
References: <1185@hoptoad.uucp> <3000002@cdp> <755@mtune.UUCP> <7242@utzoo.UUCP>
Followup-To: net.mail
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 38
Xref: watmath net.bugs:908 net.mail:2030 net.internat:343

[Further discussion should move to net.mail.]

In article <755@mtune.UUCP>, jhc@mtune.UUCP (Jonathan Clark) writes:
> >How can you send binaries in mail?
> You could if /bin/mail supported a logical separation between a letter
> and its envelope....                            do any other mail
> subsystems support this separation so that binaries could be mailed?

Yes, the Arpanet mail standard (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP,
described in RFC [Request for Comments] #821) separates the text and
the header information.  It specifically allows any of the 128 possible
7-bit characters to be sent, and does a trivial encoding to allow the
"end of text" marker to appear in messages.  It requires that 7-bit USASCII
be used, however, which makes things hard on people in Europe and Asia.

I note that Sendmail has a bug which does not allow ASCII NUL (0x00) to
be sent.  This is in violation of RFC 821.

In article <7242@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
> > What happens if the string
> > "\nFrom" appears in te binary?  Shouldn't the user agent or
> > delivery system or someone be inserting a '>' before the From?
> 
> Yup.

Actually, the mail transport system should not care about "From "s in
things.  When it gets to the far end, IF it is being delivered to a
mailbox that used "\nFrom " to delimit messages, then the far end has
to worry about this.  Lettuce work towards making all the software
transparent, then when someone writes a final delivery program that
uses a different format (e.g. delivers straight to an MH folder, which
keeps each message in a separate file), the whole thing will work.
Note that local mail delivery is not built in to sendmail -- you can
change sendmail.cf to have it call /bin/foomail rather than /bin/mail
and it really won't care.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
(C) Copyright 1986 by John Gilmore.             May the Source be with you!