From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 06:32:24 CDT
In <7QBSTTUocDB@faerber.muc.de> list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de (Claus Färber) writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> schrieb/wrote:
>> The fact that the type was message/news should be enough to indicate that
>> the headers inside the encapsulated message should be presumed to be UTF-8
>> (and if some MTA on the way has mangled them, then that is just too bad).
>With the problem that MTAs _will_ mangle them:
I think we just have to live with that. For serious work where the
encapsulated article is to be injected back into the news system you use
application/news-transmission, which is proof against mangling. If you
just use message/news (or message/rfc822) and the recipient notices that
the Newsgroups line contains some garbled newsgroups, then he just says
"Oh Dear! Seems I need to get a better MTA that supports 8BITMIME".
>So even if the headers are encapsulated in the body, sendmail talking to
>a host failing to announce 8BITMIME will trash it.
>But it also says:
>| * Null bytes are not handled properly in headers.
>|
>| Sendmail should handle full binary data. As it stands, it handles
>| all values in the body, but only 0x01-0x80 and 0xA0-0xFF in
>| the header. Notably missing is 0x00, which would require a major
>| restructuring of the code -- for example, almost no C library support
>| could be used to handle strings.
>for headers.
But NULL is not a valid character in a newsgroup-name, so that is no
problem. Indeed, our draft does not mandate correct transmission of NULL
in a news article at all, unless it is encoded into base64.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5