On 2002-03-21 at 07:55 +0100, Steinar Bang wrote:
> The case of 8bit vs. q-p is not as simple as you make it out to be.
For email, it is.
> Back in 1993, when I first started using it, I got yelled at for
> sending unreadable messages, because at the time "just-send-8" was the
> common practice here in Norway.
Fine. One country had, at one time, an accepted viewpoint which was not
that in the standards or that followed by the rest of the world.
Congratulations.
> Since most MUAs support q-p, these days, you get yelled at less. But
> almost all MTAs are still set up to be 8bit clean (ie. *never* strip
> the 8th bit, whether the sender is speaking ESMTP or not), and a lot
> of MUAs are set up to not use q-p.
If a country has an alphabet using 8-bit characters, then it's unlikely
that MTAs which aren't 8-bit-clean would have become established there.
So perhaps you won't notice any accept_8bitmime problems in Norway. But
then, if MTAs are just sending 8-bit characters _anyway_, what's the
advantage in setting it?
Someone at a UK University [1] was asking if it would cause problems for
him to set it. In the UK, it would just cause support problems. My
advice stands.
> Eg. in Netscape 4.x this setting affects both mail and news, and you
> *will* get yelled at if you use q-p on Norwegian USENET groups.
How are USENET policies relevant to what options Exim should advertise
when speaking SMTP? It's USENET. USENET != Mail (even if Mail can be
used as a USENET transport).
[1] My brother has a degree from UKC. Family genius.
Much nicer than me, too. Couldn't run an MTA to save his life,
though. ;^)
--
Protocol (n.):
Soap, with countless scriptwriters, endlessly played out by Alice and Bob.
