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From: prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: 8-bit mail
Message-ID: <679@maxim.erbe.se>
Date: 16 May 89 07:46:47 GMT
References: <557@Aragorn.dde.uucp>
Reply-To: prc@maxim.UUCP (Robert Claeson)
Followup-To: comp.mail.misc
Organization: Hall of Fame
Lines: 28

In article <557@Aragorn.dde.uucp> ct@dde.uucp (Claus Tondering) writes:

>More and more companies (especially in Europe) are moving from a
>7-bit pseudo-ASCII environment to an 8-bit environment (typically
>based on the ISO 8859/1 character set). Our company has been using
>this 8-bit character set for some years now. But we have problems with
>E-mail. Within our organization uucp transfer of E-mail with 8-bit characters
>works fine, but if our mail leaves the organization and goes to this
>country's backbone machine, the 8th bit is removed from our letters.

Some do, some don't. Our SysVR3.1 systems with sendmail don't strip the eight
bit (I know for sure, we always use ISO 8859/1 within our organization), but
most (all?) BSD systems do.

>The reason, I am told, is that E-mail is based in a set of RFCs that
>specify 7-bit ASCII as the character set to use, and therefore characters
>with the 8th bit set are stripped. Why must it be so? Uucp has no problems
>with 8-bit characters, so why must we restrict ourselves to a standard
>that is dying anyway?

RFC is an American kind of "standard". ASCII is an American standard, too.
The Americans only need 7 bits, so don't expect the RFC to change within
this century. I guess we'll have to wait for X.400 to become more widespread
(anyone got a PD X.400 MUA/MTA?).

-- 
          Robert Claeson      E-mail: rclaeson@erbe.se
	  ERBE DATA AB