🚀 go-pugleaf

From article <759@isaak.UUCP>, by woerz%isaak@isaak.uucp (Dieter Woerz):
> In article <RECERIK.89Jun14110610@alliant.uni-c.dk> recerik@alliant.uni-c.dk (Erik Bertelsen) writes:
>>X.400 in the 1984 version supports teletex and the IA5 (ASCII) character
>>encodings. The 1988 version adds some more options, but not 8-bit encodings
>>like ISO 8859/1. To my best knowledge X.400 in its current status will not
>>help us poor souls in countries with alphabets with more letters than the
>>26 letters used in English. - sigh!
> 
> Why do we have to wait? As far as I know, teletex is capable to send
> all or nearly all characters used in the ISO 8859/1 writing world.
> Let you MUA convert the ISO characters into teletex when sending mail
> and convert it to ISO 8859/1 when reading mail.

Actually, the MUA and MTA should be completely transparent in this
regard. That's a heck of a lot easier to accomplish than to change all
MUAs to conform to a given transformation standard. There is really no
good reaon why existing mailers should fiddle around with the 8th bit.

If you try to hack things by using encoding features at the MUA level,
you'll just get into trouble later, e.g.  when using the MTA for saving
a piece of mail into a file or stuffing it through a pipe into an
arbitrary program (common in sendmail, for example).

In this country we use elm, smail and sendmail (along with news), which
are fully transparent.  We therefore use ISO 8859/1 exclusively for all
mail (and news). 

Most programs involved need some hacking to accomplish this, due to all
sorts of silly assumptions used by the programs.  Stripping of the 8th
bit is never *needed* at the MUA or MTA levels, but presumably it
is very tempting for an 7-bit ascii-speaker to use the 8th bit for
something else :-)

What we need is for more companies to distribute clean mailers.  Some
already do this (HP, to name one), but others do not (Sun, to name
another) . 

Gunnar
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Gunnar Stefansson                       Uucp: {mcvax,enea}!hafro!gunnar 
Marine Research Institute		Internet: gunnar@hafro.is
P.O. Box 1390,Reykjavik    		Tel: +354 1 20240 Fax: +354 1 623790