From: Stephane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer@nic.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 04:34:19 EST
On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 10:29:14AM -0800,
Barry Caplan <bcaplan@i18n.com> wrote
a message of 23 lines which said:
> Actually, it is not Unicode which is nt mature enough. It is SMTP,
> the core mail transport protocol. It is not 8 bit clean. It is very
> clear in the RFCs that only 7bit data is allowed "over the wire".
I have to correct this because it may seriously cast doubts about the
ability of Internet email to send Unicode files.
> There are various extensions and kluges described in various RFCs
> (ESMTP, MIME, etc. )
All these extensions are referenced in the same RFC, 2821, which is
the authoritative one about SMTP. I do not know any mainstream SMTP
server which does not implement them.
The most important for us is 8BITMIME:
Eight-bit message content transmission MAY be requested of the server
by a client using extended SMTP facilities, notably the "8BITMIME"
extension [20]. 8BITMIME SHOULD be supported by SMTP servers.
> but they are not universally implemented at the server transport
> layer,
This is absolutely wrong. sendmail, Postfix and qmail allow 8-bits
transport for a *very* long time.
> But for arbitrary email from one address to another, you can't rely on it.
I send Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) emails for more than ten years (and
without using quoted-printable or other similar hacks) to
French-speaking people in various parts of the world and I'm still
waiting for an actual problem.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Dec 17 2002 - 05:14:15 EST