Character codes allowed in DATA part

[kankkune@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Risto Kankkunen)]

Mark Crispin:
> My mistake.  "0x3E" and "0x3F" were typos.  It should have been 0x7E and 0x7F,
> to read:
> 	Internet mailers MUST pass all octets with values 0x20 to 0x7E and
> 	0xA0 to 0xFF unmodified.  Other values -- 0x00 to 0x1F, 0x7F to 0x9F
> 	-- SHOULD be passed unmodified wherever possible.

Why weaken the standard? The current SMTP spec says (RFC821, page 21):

   "The mail data may contain any of the 128 ASCII character codes."

So, 0x00 to 0x7f are allowed now. The extended spec should say that 0x00
to 0xff must be passed unmodified. If some sites like to filter out
control codes, they can do it locally (e.g in mail readers). These sites
should still be able to forward the messages unmodified, for example.

Risto

-- 
 Risto Kankkunen                   kankkune@cs.Helsinki.FI (Internet)
 Department of Computer Science    kankkunen@finuh          (Bitnet)
 University of Helsinki, Finland   ..!mcsun!uhecs!kankkune   (UUCP)