Re: MIME, or subverting quoted-unprintable

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Author: John Henders
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: MIME, or subverting quoted-unprintable
On Dec 9, ijackson@??? (Ian Jackson) wrote:


> I'd like Exim to be able to Do Something about the awfulness that is
> quoted-printable.

...
> The problem: the MIME RFCs specify that 8-bit messages must be mangled
> using quoted-printable if the receiving MTA doesn't support EHLO and
> advertise 8BITMIME. This is in direct opposition to what everyone was
> doing previously (just-send-8) and causes problems with eg patchfiles
> and non-MIME MUAs.
>

You can accomplist most of what you want by just adding a line to the
source code to have exim send 8BITMIME in response to ehlo. Remember to
put a 250- in if you insert it before the HELP printout, as otherwise it
can cause problems with other mailers.

> I'd like Exim to be able optionally to:
>
> * Decode incoming quoted-printable into 8bit. This should definitely
> be on by default.
>

Not that it wouldn't be nice to do in exim, but you can do this with
procmail if you make it the default delivery agent and have a global
procmailrc file to catch mime messages.

> * Decode incoming base64'd text/* types into 7bit/8bit. This should
> probably be off by default.

...
> * When trying to deliver an 8bit message to a non-8BITMIME MTA, encode
> into quoted-printable. (I might not use this option, but the MIME
> fanatics will jump down your throat saying you have `half-baked MIME
> support' if it's not there.)
>
>From what I understand, this is the tricky bit. The RFC requires the

mailer to handle multipart encoding of the outgoing mail and it's
appearantly not fun to code.

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