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From: guy@gorodish.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Compress Mail via sendmail.cf + rmail script
Message-ID: <12296@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 29-Jan-87 02:31:46 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.12296
Posted: Thu Jan 29 02:31:46 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Jan-87 02:27:24 EST
References: <297@auspyr.UUCP> <899@dg_rtp.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 28

>In general when using mail, it's is best to use some binary -> ascii
>converter between compress and the mailer.

To quote from RFC 821, "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol":

	DATA (DATA)

	    The receiver treates the lines following the command as
	    mail data from the sender.  This command causes the mail
	    data from the command to be appended to the mail data
	    buffer.  The mail data may contain any of the 128 ASCII
	    character codes.

	    The mail data is terminated by a line containing only a
	    period, that is the character sequence "<CRLF>.<CRLF>".

and

	text line

	    The maximum total length of a text line including the
	    <CRLF> is 1000 characters....

In short, there are plenty of mail *transport* systems out there that
don't support 8-bit transparent data paths, in addition to the mail
user agents that don't.  Michael is completely correct here - with
current mail software, mail messages are ASCII text files; think of
them as such.