Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!ge-rtp!edison!rja
From: rja@edison.GE.COM (rja)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit mail
Message-ID: <1984@edison.GE.COM>
Date: 21 May 89 23:27:38 GMT
References: <557@Aragorn.dde.uucp> <679@maxim.erbe.se>
Organization: GE-Fanuc North America
Lines: 22

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.

AT&T's UNIX System V.3 and later is 8-bit transparent, but BSD UNIX
uses the high-order bit to store certain characteristics.  I am hopeful
that whenever 4.4 BSD comes out that it will be 8-bit transparent as well.

The problem will be that there are still a lot of systems out there
based on OSs that mangle the high-order bit and so the transition to
using ISO 8859 across the Internet as a whole will probably be slow.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that the Internet needs to move to support
ISO 8859 character sets.  

In the meantime, try to ensure that if you need an 8-bit character set
that you purchase an OS (like System V.3 & later) that will support it.