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Date:      Tue, 26 Nov 2002 07:57:39 +0100
From:      Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@bellavista.cz>
To:        "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Find abandoned packages
Message-ID:  <20021126065739.GL77198@freepuppy.bellavista.cz>
In-Reply-To: <tpfztp8m6a.ztp@localhost.localdomain>
References:  <000801c2915e$be8907c0$6400a8c0@windows> <9eel9eaber.l9e@localhost.localdomain> <20021125091339.GR77198@freepuppy.bellavista.cz> <tpfztp8m6a.ztp@localhost.localdomain>

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# swear@attbi.com / 2002-11-25 11:49:17 -0800:
> Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@bellavista.cz> writes:
> 
> >     Actually, it's not non-ASCII characters or MSFT products that causes
> >     problems. It's fucked up mail clients that send messages that
> >     fallaciously claim to be using charset X when they're really in Y.
> > 
> >     Incidentally, these mail clients are MSFT products.
> 
> Please correct me if you really know better (I'm no email expert), but
> I'm fairly sure that e-mail is still supposed to be "7-bit clean" so it
> can go (without encoding/decoding) through 7-bit lines (maybe with
> parity on the 8th line), etc.  Or has this been officially changed?

    AFAIK, this has changed with MIME. RFC 822 restricts email messages
    to 7 bits (ASCII), but MIME allows different charecter sets, like
    UTF8. What is still a possibility is that such a message will get
    mangled on its way by an MTA that assumes all data is ASCII, but I
    don't remember seeing anything like that happen.
 
    BTW, RFC 2045 specifies a way to pass non-ASCII messages through
    MTA's that assume all-ASCII world: the Content-Transfer-Encoding
    header.

> What you say about MSFT's fallacious charset claims is certainly true of
> HTML/HTTP, except that more often they make no claim of charset at all,
> expecting the world to conform to their charset by default.
> 
> As for HTML/MIME, I don't know if MIME supports the encoding of
> non-7-bit HTML characters into 7-bit code, or if it expects 7-bit-clean
> HTML.

    Looks like you confuse HTML and MIME, which are two distinct things
    that have moreless nothing in common.

    For example, this message is a MIME message (as opposed to an RFC
    822 message, yet it doesn't contain any HTML).

    If we restrict this to MIME: I routinely see messages from Outlook
    and its brethren claiming they're ISO-8859-2, but containing
    characters from outer space.

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