Re: [Exim] 8bitmime?

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Phil Pennock
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] 8bitmime?
On 2002-03-19 at 12:06 +0000, D.M.Chapman wrote:
> It seems from the docs that setting accept_8bitmime will allow this remote
> system to happily deliver the email to our user but is this likely to
> cause us problems in the future by delivering 8bit stuff onwards to a non
> 8 bit MTA? Are these still outthere? Should I care?


Yes. MMDF. Thus Plc (Demon Internet) -- you'll hit problems whenever
you deliver to one of the UK's largest ISPs. Perhaps not so good for a
UK academic institution. Same goes for Demon NL [*].

> I'm tempted to say sod it and just turn it on to get rid of the problem
> but will I regret this? :-)


Unfortunately, yes. At this time. Demon is working on migrating away
from MMDF; this is public knowledge. But it's still there, receiving
any mail sent to a Demon customer. Uhm, the best I can recommend, if
you feel that this is an issue, is to raise it as an issue with Demon
and to get those Demon customers whom you need to communicate to do so.

If a server doesn't advertise 8BITMIME, any server which _does_ have
8bit content, should downgrade the content. Exim doesn't have the
ability to do this. Therefore you'll be introducing breakage and
corruption by turning the feature on.

[*] lots of disclaimers here; see X-Disclaimer: header, it applies here.
--
"I was like Frankenstein's monster, with people following me with pitchforks
because of [spamming]." -- Walt (Picklejar) Rines, CEO of TargitMail.com