Keith Moore claims that there were SMTP servers in 1991 that _crashed_
when they saw 8-bit bodies.
Over the last few years I have repeatedly asked Moore for evidence to
back up this claim. He has never provided any such evidence.
In 1997 I reviewed the old ietf-smtp archives and found a 1991 message
from Robert Ullmann on the same issue. Guess what? Contrary to Moore's
claims, nobody could find any SMTP servers that crashed on 8-bit bodies.
Keith Moore writes:
At the time MIME was defined there were reports of several MTAs in
deployment which could not handle 8bit characters in the message
body - some would corrupt the message; others would get wedged or
crash.
Corrupt 8-bit bodies, yes. Crash, no.
I don't think it's fair to brand this as a failure, because it slowed
the deployment of "just send 8",
sendmail started doing just-send-8 by default in 1993. See
http://pobox.com/~djb/proto/smtp/8bitmime.html for further discussion.
Amazingly enough, the IETF _still_ doesn't admit that SMTP servers are,
as a practical matter, required to accept 8-bit messages.
---Dan