[I have tried to hand-hack a nice MIME message in quoted-printable here,
since I don't have code to do it yet. If your mailer breaks on it,
sorry, but fix it ;-]
nsb> == Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)thumper(_dot_)bellcore(_dot_)com>
nsb> The hard reality is that there are lots of mail transport agents
nsb> out there that think they have license to mess with line breaks.
nsb> If everything gets converted to CRLF format before transport, I
nsb> predict that LOTS of existing transport agents will break, badly,
nsb> because they've suddenly started getting CRLF where they expected
nsb> whatever the local standard was.
I don't see it. If they're encoded, non-MIME-aware transport agents
won't know WHAT the newlines "really" are; they'll never be getting CRLF
where they expected something else.
After all, it'll just look like this.
There will sometimes be lines ending in an equal sign that will be soft line
breaks.
There will sometimes be normal hard line breaks which are going to be
sent as CRLF (Rule #4: "A line break, whatever [...] the local newline
convention, must be represented by a (RFC 822) line break [...]").
None of this is any different than before; any implementation which
can't accept incoming CRLF from the network is badly broken.
My MIME-aware MUA is presumably feeding my local MTA whatever it wants
in local newline format; the MTA is responsible for turning that into
network newlines for me when it leaves here.
If I really want a CR or NL or whatever, I'll put in =OD or =0A, but
I'll assume my 'normal' hard newlines are going to arrive as CRNL and
get turned into local newline convention by the other guy's MTA when
they're stored. A MIME-aware MUA would then do the right thing with
them (treat them as newlines for anything acting as text; treat them as
0x0D0A for application/binary; etc).
--Chris
Christopher Davis <ckd(_at_)eff(_dot_)org> | INTERESTING DEFINITIONS
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