From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 25 2002 - 11:44:18 CDT
In <8XAw21jZcDC@3247.org> list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de (Claus Färber) writes:
>This is not the answer to my question. There are a lot of mail<->news
>gateways _today_. Will they correctly convert a header with unencoded
>UTF-8, as it is proposed for news, to RFC 2047/2231, which is needed for
>email?
The current Email and News standards do not permit 8bit in headers at
all. So there is no reason whatsoever to expect (let alone require) that
existing gateways should immediately cope with the new regime.
We are proposing a brand new feature for Netnews, namely UTF-8 in headers.
We do not expect it to work perfectly in the existing network from Day 1,
but we must concern ourselves with whether or not it will break anything
that is already working. I think we have pretty well assured ourselves
that it will not.
So what will an existing gateway be likely to do? I can see several
possibilities:
1. It will collapse in a heap.
2. It will attempt to transmit the 8bit characters. Maybe they will make
it through, maybe they won't. If they don't, then the header in question
will appear munged at the far end.
3. It will truncate to 7bit. The header in question will certainly appear
munged at the far end.
4. It will reject the entire article (with or without informing the
sender).
5. It will recognize it as UTF-8 and convert to RFC 2047.
I think (1) is pretty unlikely. I daresay 'gnus' might be smart enough to
manage (5), but I doubt many other systems would be.
I think any of the other behaviours in the middle would be acceptable in
the short term.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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