At 3:38 PM 10/28/94, Keith Moore wrote:
This is NOT true for BINARY. If a message containing a BINARY body
part is gatewayed from an ASCII into an EBCDIC environemnt, it MUST
NOT be translated to EBCDIC. Doing so corrupts the data. A
correctly written user agent will assume that the data in a BINARY
body part is the same, octet for octet, as when it was composed.
Yes, *assuming that the user agent is indeed expecting a MIME message*.
If the gateway is saving the data for a non-MIME user agent, it should
translate to whatever that agent expects.
In general a gateway into an EBCDIC world would not know what the
recipient's UA expects. Even if the recipient's UA were known not to
expect MIME, the gateway would still have to translate the binary data into
some form which could be understood and extracted by the recipient's UA.
In general, the BINARY c-t-e must be considered *incompatible* with
non-MIME UAs, just as is the case for q-p and base64. Even if the
data makes it through transport intact, it will often not be in
canonical form.
Keith