On Sun, 11 Feb 96 23:42:09 0500 you said:
><ned@innosoft.com>t.com>,
>		   Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>Subject: If you can read this you understand the example.
>X-Mailer: MR/2 Internet Cruiser Edition v0.99p
>
>Some more samples:
>
>This comes from a newer version of Free Agent. Still the same problem: I
>would guess that this is due to the fact that they are only declaring text
>and nothing else. Rather primitive for such a hyped-up program. How to
>solve this? One possibility could perhaps be to assume that the sending
>system/program has been  using the same codepage as the receiver. There
>will of course be instances when this is wrong, but probably not so many.

I'm not sure why I received this, but I happen to have contacted Fort
for exactly this problem, with the text to include in the header.
I'm not sure they fully understood the importance.
They are now about to "implement MIME" but I have the feeling that
their intent is more related to encoding/decoding binaries than to
serve the character sets purpose.
So, it would probably help if they received a couple of other
similar requests, and that's now.

I'm taking this opportunity to checkpoint the status of the SMTP8 issue.
As I have predicted it must be 3 years ago now, many mail MUAs and MTAs
still continue to do happy 8-bit mail without much notion of MIME.
Yes, 8-bit mail very often *works* and all it takes to have it most often
work is to say that it should.

That's 3 basic rules:
1) MTAs MUST relay mail body exactly as they receive it (unless they
gateway with another mail protocol dictating otherwise, such as with
character translation). That's EASY.
2) [the user should know that] an MTA MAY return 8-bit mail for some
reason when it drops it in a local mail box (but it's of course discouraged).
3) the coded character set MUST be identified with MIME header entries.

You can see that this would solve the Fort case, the case of this
particular MUA I'm using now and many others (nothing's done because
MIME is too much to implement but if you tell people that all it takes
to at least send mail correctly is a simple addition to the header,
they will do it).

I'm not on the list any more, so use my e-mail address if you want
to contact me.

Andr.