Re: Suggestions for 8BITMIME capability

On 10 Jun 2011, at 06:10, Kevin Goodsell wrote:
> There was a request some time back to get the 8BITMIME capability added
> to tmda-ofmipd:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=25325009
> 
> As I understand it, this requires possibly re-encoding messages to a
> 7-bit format when transmitting to a host that doesn't advertise 8BITMIME
> support. However, there's an interesting case made for a different
> approach here:
> http://cr.yp.to/smtp/8bitmime.html
> 
> Since this requires virtually no effort to implement, it's appealing to me.

I think, for tmda-ofmipd, the easiest and at the same time safest solution is to make it a command-line option, say -8, which decides whether or not 8BITMIME is advertised.  Since the owner of tmda-ofmipd is also the one specifying the host to which mail is relayed, he can know in advance whether or not it will accept any eight-bit mail he may send via tmda-ofmipd.  For this to work you will also need a config option in tmda-inject that will properly denote eight-bit mail using a command-line switch to sendmail (-B8BITMIME) or the equivalent SMTP parameter to MAIL From.  See RFC 6152.  While this does leave open the possibility of mail being designated 8BITMIME when it is in fact just 7BIT, in practice this probably isn't likely to be a problem.

> Does anyone have any thoughts what approach to take? Also, I'm wondering
> what difference 8BITMIME makes in practice. My mailer seems to send 8
> bits without this capability advertised, which makes testing tricky. If
> I knew of use-cases that actually fail without 8BITMIME, that might
> help.

For example, Alpine will use the SMTP's advertisement to (by default) decide whether to just send 8 or QP-encode.

Cheers,
Sabahattin

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content
authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image
Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
tmda-workers mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tmda-workers