From: Ian Bell (ianbell@turnpike.com)
Date: Thu Sep 19 2002 - 04:25:57 CDT
On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>In <3D87B79F.7010601@alex.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>>Charles Lindsey wrote:
>>> In <3D8632ED.2080006@alex.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>>>>No, SMTP provides no guarantee of 8-bit transport....
>
>It provides guaranteed 8-bit transport within bodies when 8BITMIME is
>supported
Not quite.
ESMTP guarantees that it will accept 8bit bodies; it does _not_
guarantee transport of 8bit bodies in 8bit form.
ESMTP servers may encounter non-8BITMIME servers on the next hop. But
that's OK because they know how to convert 8bit MIME parts into 7bit
MIME parts: leave headers alone as they're 7bit and encode leaf parts
with qp or base64.
And there's the problem: they are meant to be able to assume that
headers are 7bit; they have no way in general of knowing what to do with
8bit data within headers...
>(that support is pretty well universal now). That includes the
>headers of MIME multiparts
...so no it doesn't.
-- Ian Bell T U R N P I K E