🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5681@castle.ed.ac.uk>, yfcw14@castle.ed.ac.uk (K P Donnelly) writes:

> I find that I can send 8-bit mail messages over the UK JANET network
> to and from VAX/VMS machines without trouble.  However, it seems that if
> mail goes anywhere near a Unix machine it gets the eighth bit stripped.
> The trouble seems to be the file transfer utility hhcp.

I assume that with "hhcp" you mean "uucp". Uucp doesn't strip anything.
One can send binary files using uucp (this is how we get our 'news').
I believe that the problem lies in "sendmail", especially as implemented
on many UNIX systems running BSD UNIX. Many System V UNIXes that comes
with sendmail does allow 8 bit characters.

> Would anyone like to summarize experiences elsewhere with 8-bit mail.
> Are any networks already happily using ISO 8859-1 for mail?

Yes, our internal network is using ISO 8859/1 for e-mail. It consists
of UNIX hosts only. However, as soon as any message goes up to the EUnet
backbone here, the eight bit is chopped off all characters in the message.

> What are the main bottlenecks at present to 8-bit work?

I don't believe that there are any. In fact, chopping off the eight bit,
as done on many hosts, is likely to consume more CPU power. The network
bandwidth used would be the same.

The X.25 protocol as such is also eight-bit clean, but when e-mail is
transferred over X.3/X.29 (ie, the PAD function), it is common to have
to encode 8 bit data using plain ASCII or something similar, as done
by, for example the uucp 'f' protocol, btoa and uuencode. This is because
many PADs don't permit a completely eight-bit transparent path.

-- 
Robert Claeson                  |Reasonable mailers: rclaeson@erbe.se
ERBE DATA AB                    |      Dumb mailers: rclaeson%erbe.se@sunet.se
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These opinions reflect my personal views and not those of my employer (ask him).