Re: Whether 8-bit SMTP? And how?

[Mark Crispin <MRC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <>, Erik Naggum writes:
>The Japanese rely on SI and SO to survive the
>transfer.

Correction.  That's for the old system of katakana (Japanese phonetic
characters) characters only.  You could also transmit mixed katakana/ASCII on
an 8-bit path.

Although most Japanese terminals still support this, this system was replaced
by JIS-kanji (14 bit character set) several years ago.  Katakana characters
exist in the JIS set, so there is generally no reason to use the old katakana
system unless you're talking to someone with a katakana-only terminal.  [I
have such a beast, but I rarely use it for sending Japanese simply because it
isn't very useful.]

ESC, on the other hand, is very important for Japanese e-mail.