From: Kai Henningsen (kaih@khms.westfalen.de)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 01:46:00 CDT
barr@visi.com (David Barr) wrote on 28.04.03 in <000501c30db2$c07bbb60$0200000a@DAVE>:
> familiar with its, um, characteristics. The stripping was a result of the
> way the files were stored - the system simply was not able to let you put
> whitespace on the end of a line, and truncated it. With the long demise of
I'm not so sure this is accurate. I don't remember what this package did,
but in general you had a choice of storing text in something like F80
format - which would add spaces to any line shorter than 80, and truncate
any line longer than that, and used no end-of-line marker - or use some
variant of Vsomething or so, which used a byte count for every line, and
thus most certainly *could* handle trailing spaces, exept just about no
text handling software cared to handle it that way.
F80 was by far more popular. That was what they used for BSMTP, and what
is behind the 2822 rules (just as the rather loose charset handling in
BITNET is behind MIME's base64 choices). Under F80, *every* line is
exactly 80 bytes long. Of course trailing space cannot have semantic value
- cou cannot determine if it is there for that value, or just to fill the
line!
(BITNET used BSMTP, not SMTP - BSMTP-format mails were sent via the spool-
and-forward network from one MTA to another, and if you put in the right
command (something with VERB, I think), you could even get back the SMTP
answers from at least the first MTA, but of course none of the standard
tools did that.)
MfG Kai