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List:       imap
Subject:    Re: 8bit MIME Support
From:       Chris Newman <Chris.Newman () Sun ! COM>
Date:       2003-05-14 23:29:24
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See

  <http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/smtplist.html>

and

  <http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1652.html>

                - Chris

begin  quotation by Dilip Menon on 2003/5/14 14:10 -0700:

> 
> Hi, 
>   
> I do know that this may not be the right place for me to get details on
> 8-bit/7-bit support.  However, I would appreciate if anyone can provide me
> any leads on this.    
> For our mail-server we plan to support SMTP extensions (especially 8
> bit MIME support).  
> 
> Will these changes affect my IMAP server, or is it all left for the
> Mail-Client to handle. 
> 
> Again I am not clear about following issue :
> 
> If remote MTA does not support 8bit MIME, then the sender MTA should
> convert message from 8 bit to 7 bit and send the message. Now, there can be
> 3 approaches (apart from perm error NDR generation) that I am aware of :
>     1. The sender MTA should first convert whole message to original
> encoding (octet stream), and then apply base 64 encoding on that to get 7
> bit. But, this seems to be very length procedure and tedious processing.
> 
>      2. The sender MTA should apply quoted-printable encoding (one can use
> even base64 encoding also .. as final aim is 7bit output ?) directly on 8
> bit MIME message. But, then we lose track of original message format
> (say,octet stream). And, mail clients trying to retrieve message from this
> remote MTA will not be able to get original message format (octet stream).
> They will be able to decode the message to 8bit MIME, but not from 8 bit
> MIME to octet stream (original message format), as we have lost track of
> octet stream -> 8bit MIME encoding.
> 
>     3. The sender MTA should apply either quoted printable or base 64
> encoding on whole message (except original headers), and send that as
> attachment to original headers. But, this means, user will get original
> message as a attachment.
> 
>      Now, I am not able to make out whether my approaches are right and
> which way to go ? 
>   
> Regards,




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