🚀 go-pugleaf

 Paul Robinson <TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
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From: "David B. Schnepper" <daves@borland.com> writes in
insoft-l@cis.vutbr.cs:

> I agree with Patrick's stance on this.  Without looking at the
> SMTP standard, I'ld wager a (small) sum that they don't
> specify the use of the *characters* "From: " to tag the sender
> of the message, but they do specify the byte sequence <46>
> <72> <6F> <6D> <3A> <20>, which if sent to a tty expecting
> ASCII causes "From: " to appear, but if the tty expects
> Unicode something totally different appears.

You lose; pay up!

The SMTP standard and the mail message standard date back more than 10
years ago back when the state of the art in electronic communication was a
PDP 11/34 sending a message to a CDC Cyber, e.g dinosaurs talking with
each other.  The standards (RFC841 for SMTP and RFC842 for mail messages)
specify that the text is ASCII.

For SMTP, the recipient system is required to send a message which begins
with the number 220, a space and the domain name, all in ASCII.  The
sender must send the text string "HELO " and his domain name.  The text
specified is what appears in the quotes.

You can argue the point about byte sequences and such, but the fact is
that the text required to be sent is specified in the standards as certain
strings, and the strings are specified as a certain text value, the value
being the SMTP command words, SMTP response code numbers, or the mail
envelope keywords.  It is not specified as hex values, but as specific
strings in a specific character set.

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Paul Robinson -- TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM