Re: Reviewing philosophies and assumptions

[kankkune@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Risto Kankkunen)]

> What I'm trying to do is propose ways in which an MTA can decline to
> accept anything it can't handle without information loss.  It might be
> that your arguments about, say, X clients, argues that all MTAs *should*
> run "transparent".  But I'd like to see provision for those that
> don't/won't/ can't.

On sites that don't want to let users see messages that they might not
be able to read properly, one alternative would be for those MTAs (or
some filter program after that) to discard messages that contain unknown
character sets. I assume here that some kind of content-type/encoding
header is used to tell the set. This has the disadvantage of receiving
the whole message. However, it wouldn't require SMTP changes, which I'd
like to keep in minimum.

Personally, I wouldn't mind receiving totally uncomprehensive mail that
looks something like line-noise. I could always ask the sender to use
only ASCII or tell what program to use to view his messages...


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