Re: 8bit & binary

[[e-mail]]

You are probably thinking of draft-ietf-822ext-mime-conf-01.txt,
which says:

4.  MIME Conformance

....
A mail user agent that is MIME-conformant MUST:
....
 (2)   Recognize the Content-Transfer-Encoding header field
       and decode all received data encoded with either the
       quoted-printable or base64 implementations.  Any non-
       7-bit data that is sent without encoding must be
       properly labelled with a content-transfer-encoding of
       8bit or binary, as appropriate.  If the underlying
       transport does not support 8bit or binary (as SMTP
       [RFC821] does not), the sender is required to both
       encode and label data using an appropriate Content-
       Transfer-Encoding such as quoted-printable or base64.


It is hard to see how this means that support of ESMTP is required.
I think, however, that the prose *should* say that the behaviour of
one certain gateway, whihc rejected any message containing 
"Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit", is completely broken.

Even display of messages containing "Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit"
and arriving over unextended SMTP (the 7-and-sometimes-8-bit transport)
should be displayed, I think.

                 Harald A