"Binary"/international text in mail
gnu at hoptoad.UUCP
gnu at hoptoad.UUCP
Tue Oct 21 10:14:56 AEST 1986
[Further discussion should move to net.mail.]
In article <755 at mtune.UUCP>, jhc at mtune.UUCP (Jonathan Clark) writes:
> >How can you send binaries in mail?
> You could if /bin/mail supported a logical separation between a letter
> and its envelope.... do any other mail
> subsystems support this separation so that binaries could be mailed?
Yes, the Arpanet mail standard (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP,
described in RFC [Request for Comments] #821) separates the text and
the header information. It specifically allows any of the 128 possible
7-bit characters to be sent, and does a trivial encoding to allow the
"end of text" marker to appear in messages. It requires that 7-bit USASCII
be used, however, which makes things hard on people in Europe and Asia.
I note that Sendmail has a bug which does not allow ASCII NUL (0x00) to
be sent. This is in violation of RFC 821.
In article <7242 at utzoo.UUCP>, henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
> > What happens if the string
> > "\nFrom" appears in te binary? Shouldn't the user agent or
> > delivery system or someone be inserting a '>' before the From?
>
> Yup.
Actually, the mail transport system should not care about "From "s in
things. When it gets to the far end, IF it is being delivered to a
mailbox that used "\nFrom " to delimit messages, then the far end has
to worry about this. Lettuce work towards making all the software
transparent, then when someone writes a final delivery program that
uses a different format (e.g. delivers straight to an MH folder, which
keeps each message in a separate file), the whole thing will work.
Note that local mail delivery is not built in to sendmail -- you can
change sendmail.cf to have it call /bin/foomail rather than /bin/mail
and it really won't care.
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore at lll-crg.arpa
(C) Copyright 1986 by John Gilmore. May the Source be with you!
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