Re: [Emailcore] Ticket #14: G.7.8. Review different size limits

[Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>]

Jeremy Harris wrote in
 <[e-mail]>:
 |On 17/07/2021 17:16, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Your MUA created the according MIME headers, but whether it used
 |> the 8BITMIME SMTP extension when passing this over to a MTA, that
 |> is here the question.
 |
 |See https://cr.yp.to/smtp/8bitmime.html for one opinion, written quite
 |a long time ago.  Exim has been following that for the last nine years.

I have to say i never quite understood the "an email message must
be human readable text" approach.  It is fine in Plan9 Nupas or
something, were (the individual parts of) your mail messages are
converted to files which are accessible with the normal Unix text
processing tool chain, via a "pseudo" filesystem.  But for over-
the-wire, or even local storage, noone ever cared (mostly) for
binary storage of databases, office documents, calendars or
whatever.  I mean yes of course they do, but mostly not in respect
to "i can use my normal Unix text toolchain on those files".
(Just in case anyone feels RTF or XML or VCARD or JSON or whatever
is something really humanoid.)

I for one hate it that i have to add JSON parsing for SMTP and
other protocols just for the OAUTH authentication handshake, where
K1=V1\0K2=V2\0\0 would do, (i will use jsmn, many open source
people do, also from mailers, take nmh for example, but mind you,
it maps to "object"s with "length"s, 'thus provides the full JSON
power), but get the "we are so much better than you and you just
do not get it right" attitude when i claim that a mail message in
raw form is just a container of some type.  I have no problem with
MBOX and MIME content encoding, and why Maildir is easier to dig
for humans given the file naming scheme than MBOX is, i never
understood.

So technical 7-bit limits have long vanished, and 8-bit
with many NULs (given the UTF-16 common in some worlds, and of
course in binary anyway) is no problem, for message data as such
i never got that message/global and everything is just human text
thing.  Calling the sewer that a real life message is human text
is a cultural bankruptcy and philosophically contemptible.  Not
that engineers ever cared those aspects of life (as long as the
code of conduct is followed), but it may be mentioned once.
And while mentioning things, one or two months ago i created
a Microsoft Outlook account because i wanted to check OAuth
updates that my little MUA needs, and whereas IMAP just worked out
of the box POP3 did not at all even though checked, and SMTP also
did not because i never knew, and when after several unsuccessful
tries i was sending 

  Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2021 23:02:56 +0200
  From: Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>
  To: [e-mail]
  Subject: Please, i want SMTP for microsoft
  Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

  Yea??

they locked my account and want my phone number to get out of
that, because of policy violation, and so i thought it was time to
quit.  However i was long enough there to find it applicable to
add several _classes_ of mail headers to my ignore list (^IronPort
^MGA ^Spam ^(Accept|Content)-Language ^Thread-) (for message
saving only).

A nice Sunday everybody.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)