Re: [Exim] what is exim's reaction (rfc1652)

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Author: dman
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] what is exim's reaction (rfc1652)
On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 08:15:43PM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
| On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, dman wrote:

|
| > Suppose this is the scenario :
| >
| > 1)  a user agent creates a message with the high-order bit set on some
| >     characters
| >
| > 2)  the user agent pipes the mesasge to exim like that
| >
| > 3)  when exim tries to hand off the message via SMTP, the remote host
| >     doesn't advertise 8BITMIME
| >
| > WIll exim bounce the message as rfc1652 seems to require, or is that
| > considered a bug in the user agent that created the message?

|
| As documented, Exim is 8-bit clean. It will "just send 8". It doesn't
| even look at what the receiving host advertises.


Ok, it's considered a bug in the user agent. Perhaps it would be
useful (for local pipes) for exim to output a warning message on
stderr and exit with non-zero status if any characters are not 7-bit?
Of course, this behavior should be toggleable like the accept_8bitmime
option.

| The justification for this is given in my book. (Executive summary: this
| action is more likely to "do what the user wanted" than anything else.)


I have no problem with simply being 8-bit clean rather than
pedantically following the "SMTP is 7-bit" definition by stripping the
high-order bit.

I was just wondering what the effect would be if a user agent whose
output wasn't 7-bit tried to send Tony a message with exim as the
system's mta. Apparently that's not a good thing to do.

HAND,
-D

--

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