At 17.28 -0800 1999-02-11, Ned Freed wrote:
Recently we've run into a number of cases where agents will simply refuse
messages with 8bit in the headers.
Nowadays I have only seen the problem when talking about gateways
from SMTP to some other "messaging plattform" which uses a different
character set than US-ASCII. The problems arises when the final
message on the "other side" of the gateway consists of information
from both the headers and the body of a message. Normally, the From:
and the Subject: headers are used for information for the receiver --
and those do often include characters which doesn't exist in the
character set used on the other side of the gateway.
The plattforms I am talking about in perticular are gateways to SMPP
which runs on X.25, and is used when sending SMS messages in the GSM
system.
The combination of limited character set and new technology (which
means non-email-aware developers) makes those products which pop up
from whatever rock you lift pretty bad.
By talking to the developers that they have to support the 8BITMIME
ESMTP extension, it is easy to force them to have a look at character
set issues in general.
Patrik