From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Wed May 18 2005 - 08:29:00 CDT
At 14:40 +0200 2005/05/18, Antoine Leca wrote:
>On Wednesday, May 18, 2005 2:24 AM Hans Aberg wrote:
>
>> The simplest way would be to write the SMTP protocol to require 8-bit
>> uses. Then those mail servers still out there which zeroes the 8'th
>> bit are no longer SMTP compliant, and must be changed. People have
>> now had more than ten years to change their mail server software, so
>> it should be not a big problem.
>
>RFC 2821 (which indeed asks servers to support the 8BITMIME extension, using
>SHOULD) is "only" 4 year old (RFC 1652 did not require server support.)
>Also the renewing of softwares in this area is _very_ slow (why changing
>something that just works?)
>And some mail administrators are quite angry when you ask them to update
>their softwares, but more importantly the vast majority of them quite simply
>do not attend your requests (because of the excess of junk mail that is
>floating around.)
Perhaps one needs some kind of crawler program that locates the 7-bit
only mail servers. Then one can systematically weed them out.
>I guess RFC 2821 did the first step, which was to include the SHOULD. Its
>revision will then put MUST (thus requiring effective upgrades),
Right.
>and it
>would be the next revision after that which could allow a client (MUA or
>MTA) to send 8-bit material without proper workaround if the server is not
>able to deal with it... Only then you could say the castrating servers are
>eliminated.
Castrating the castrating mail servers. Tying it back to Unicode, it
would seem a simplification if UTF-8 data could be passed via mail
without squeezing it into 7-bit encodings.
-- Hans Aberg
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