ietf-822
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RE: gzip-8bit

2003-02-26 20:07:33

While the POP3 spec doesn't require support for 8 bit MIME, I'm not aware of any implementations which have problems with 8 bit MIME.

IMAP permits 8 bit in APPEND as long as the charset is explicitly labelled, so IMAP standards compliant clients have to deal with 8 bit MIME and I'm not aware of any problems.

Now unlabelled 8 bit in the headers is a completely different story. I know of systems which will: strip some of the 8-bit characters, downconvert to 2047 with "UNKNOWN" charset label, convert all 8-bit characters to '?', and bounce the message before it gets in the message store. For any given message, the vast majority of clients will display the headers in a charset other than the sender's intention. So it just wouldn't interoperate.

               - Chris

begin  quotation by Dan Kohn on 2003/2/26 17:32 -0800:


Bruce Lilly wrote:

BTW, does anyone know of NNTP or 8BitMIME ESMTP transport
implementations that do not support 998 octets per line?

Don't forget POP and IMAP!

Good point.  I may have missed something obvious, but my quick read of
RFC 1939 says that POP3 only supports RFC 822 messages.  Can someone
comment on POP3's capabilities to deal with 8BitMIME and binary content?
Presumably, at least 8BitMIME is supported, or else POP3 servers would
have been corrupting all sorts of European charsets for years.

Can conforming IMAP4 implementations only support 7bit bodies?  If so,
what the capabilities negotiation to indicate 8BitMIME support?

          - dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
<http://www.dankohn.com/>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>



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