Subject: Is smail MIME compliant

From: Mike Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 1996 10:40:23 -0700

I just had somebody tell me that *NIX mailers (They didn't specify
which one) don't support MIME.  This person claims that the MIME messages
he's been sending through my mail server aren't working because it's a *NIX
host.  This I find hard to swallow.  Could somebody clear this up for me,
DOES smail support MIME?  Thank you for your time.

                                                                mike...

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From: [email-masked] (Gilbert Ramirez Jr.)
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 1996 15:58:59 -0500 (CDT)

> 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.
         
>                                                                 mike...

--gilbert
______________________________________________________________________
Gilbert Ramirez Jr.                     [email-masked]
University of Texas                     http://merece.uthscsa.edu/gram
Health Science Center at San Antonio    University Health System

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From: [email-masked] (Bill Roman)
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 06:48:44 -0700 (PDT)

> It's the user agent (pine, elm, mail, xmail) that should decode the MIME

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  ([email-masked] / [email-masked])   running linux