Re: Is smail MIME compliant

[roman@songdog.eskimo.com (Bill Roman)]

Gilbert Ramirez Jr. wrote:
> 
> As Mike Wood said:
> > 
> > DOES smail support MIME?  Thank you for your time.
> 
> To the transport agen (smail, sendmail), the contents of the e-mail message
> don't matter.
> 
> It's the user agent (pine, elm, mail, xmail) that should decode the MIME
> part of your message.
>          

Just a guess here -- it may be that the user complaining about *NIX
boxes not processing MIME mail correctly is sending eight-bit data.
The original SMTP specification allowed only a seven-bit character set,
but more recently an extended version called ESMTP has made it possible
to negotiate for an eight-bit transfer.  Unfortunately not all *NIX
systems are running mail transfer agents which support ESMTP; one SMTP
transfer agent along the way messes up eight-bit data unrecoverably.

(Please -- don't let me restart the flame war on this topic from which
I learned so much.  It's all been said....)

What is the user complaining about MIME problems running as a mail user
agent?  I suspect that some M$DOS mailers may casually send eight-bit
data in violation of the applicable Internet standards.

-- 
Bill Roman  (roman@songdog.eskimo.com / roman@songdog.uucp)   running linux