Re: [exim] Valid Chars in Headers of Emails

Craig Whitmore wrote:

>>I have just cut'n pasted that subject, '®' included, and sent it via a
>>non-Exim
>>MX in Zurich thru an Exim MX in Hong Kong, MUA Mozilla on Mac OS X in
>>Virginia
>>at both ends, and nary a problem.
>
>
> Maybe not a problem.. but if people "break the rules".....

Yes, but...

- ARPAnet has passed into ancient history.

- China, India, Brazil alone, not to mention Malaysia, Indonesia, most of
Africa, all of the Middle East, Scandinavia, Turkey, Russia, the 'former East
Bloc', and much of Africa all use national languages that do not fit ASCII neatly.

Computer and internet use in these areas is no longer insignificant.

The 'net is becoming less and less an 'English only' exercise with each passing
year.

I'd far rather see UTF-8 compatibility than a breakup of top-level routers into,
for example, Chinese encoding and ASCII.

>
> Most MUA's I've found will do the proper encoding , checking the reject
> logs, there are very little which actually get rejected becuase of this, as
> most messages are encoded properly and don't have non-ascii chars in the
> headers. The number of messages rejected is less than 50 a day (out of tens
> of thousands a day on the particular server)
>
>
>>Header shows encoding as UTF-8, though. Not iso-8/859-1
>>
>>Your ruleset will block a great of 'pragmatically allowable' message
>>traffic,
>>even if you think the whole universe ends at US borders and runs only on
>>US-Windows.
>>
>>Either of which would be an odd stance for a Kiwi.
>
>
> I've found only a very few false possitives and even hotmail/yahoo does it
> wrong sometimes encoding the subject properly, but leaving the To unencoded
> and vica versa.
>

Fine for you perhaps. But rejecting a message from Chinese-speaking customers
in Shanghai or Beijing to Chinese-speaking business in Hong Kong potentially
carries thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars of value *per message*.

Likewise a Swiss firm we serve who sell product to over 100 countries, and have
both staff and dealer organizations with the relevant language skills.

It isn't just an issue of respect for diverse cultures, it is recognition of
economic realities.

smtp has traditionally relied on MIME extensions to handle non-ASCII content,
but that is no longer good enough where folks do ALL their work in a non-English
language and/or on a non-MS desktop - as in mandated by law for government
agencies on more than one continent.

> I have emailed microsoft/yahoo (does anyone know the proper people to email
> at these places) about the problem.
>
> Thanks
>

MSN & Yahoo in which countries?

Feel free to restrict yourself to ASCII-only if you insist, but even US-based
multinationals, not to mention Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, have all come to
realize that theirs is not the only language on Earth.

YMMV,

Bill