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From: storm@texas.dk (Kim F. Storm)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: 8-bit mail
Message-ID: <321@texas.dk>
Date: 7 Jun 89 20:27:55 GMT
References: <557@Aragorn.dde.uucp>
Organization: Texas Instruments, Denmark
Lines: 45

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.

>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?

Other people have pointed out the technical reasons for the stripping of the 
eight bit (the Danish backbone is a BSD based system).  It has alse been
pointed out, that there is little hope that all 8 bit messages will
survive, and that we will have to live with this draw-back until X.400
comes around and solves all our problems.

However, at least in Europe where the need for 8-bit character sets is
greater than in the U.S., the Backbones on EUnet should run mailers that
can forward 8-bit data unchanged (not the situation today).  If an end-site
cannot handle 8-bit data it is their problem.

However, even if the backbones and the end-sites would pass on 8-bit data,
we would still be faced with the problem that the messages may be read on
a terminal with a different character set than the one it was posted from.
The poster will have to tell which character set his message is written in,
and the recipient must use a terminal which can show this character set,
or his mail program must be able to remap the characters in a sensible way.

I think that a new header field would be required for this, e.g.
Character-Set: 8859/1 
and if that is missing, ASCII (8859/0 ?) is assumed.  

Is the concept of characters sets defined in X.400 or are we going 
to have the same problem there?

-- 
Kim F. Storm        storm@texas.dk        Tel +45 429 174 00
Texas Instruments, Marielundvej 46E, DK-2730 Herlev, Denmark
	  No news is good news, but nn is better!