Re: switching from exim to postfix
On 01/05/12 15:10, Chris Knadle wrote:
> I think the reason Exim does not do this protocol conversion is that from the
> point of view of an MTA author, the point of an MTA is to transmit the body of
> the message without any modification to it once received, and body
> modification would be required to convert 8-bit MIME to 7-bit MIME. I seem to
> remember reading something along these lines in the Exim documentation years
> ago and I'm having another look through it, but haven't found a reference to
> this yet.
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch14.html#SECTalomo
says:
"This option causes Exim to send 8BITMIME in its response to an SMTP
EHLO command, and to accept the BODY= parameter on MAIL commands.
However, though Exim is 8-bit clean, it is not a protocol converter, and
it takes no steps to do anything special with messages received by this
route. Consequently, this option is turned off by default."
I have enabled accept_8bitmime in every exim I've installed for the last
10 years and no one has reported any problems. I think the risk of
encountering a truly 7 bit MTA in this decade is low enough to be
ignored for most purposes. Anyone still using one is likely to find that
a substantial fraction of their incoming mail is corrupted.
Roger
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