[1689] in linux-announce channel archive
8-bit mailing list postings, the final word...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David S. Miller)
Mon Feb 5 23:56:38 1996
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 20:00:57 -0500
From: "David S. Miller" <davem@caip.rutgers.edu>
To: linux-announce@vger.rutgers.edu
CC: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, mea@utu.fi
As some of you have noticed, I enabled 8-bit postings on the lists at
vger. I soon came to learn that this was a *huge* mistake. I should
have done my homeworks before I blindly succumbed to the endless
whines I was receiving from people.
Turning on this 8-bit "feature" *violates* the SMTP protocol. What
are the results of doing this?
1) If somewhere along the exploder route a mailer lacks this "back
door" 8-bit character support, you still won't get the 8-bit
message.
2) Some mailers complain so loudly that they refuse to *deliver* the
mail to the recipients at all. That is, people on the mailing
lists unfairly do not receive postings. This alarmed me the most.
Here are some words from the zmailer maintainer Matti Aarnio (zmailer
is the mailer I use on vger):
I see also that you turned ZMailer into violation of the
SMTP protocols, the "-8" is NOT legal for the whole world..
in fact it is illegal everywhere, but many places let you
to get away with it.. (And RFC 1458 has a caveat letting
people use 'off-band negotiation' for the 8BITMIME capability,
however you CAN'T assume it just bluntly for the whole world!)
As a matter of fact, anything that goes thru secondary
ZMailers (like most of the Europe going thru nic.funet.fi,
or other fully compliant mailers, like sendmail-8.7.*)
will still have forced conversions in case the final target
behind them is not known to handle properly the 8-bit input.
Sure it lessens the number of whinings, but people who send
stuff to the list should stick to 7-bit US-ASCII in their
whole emails, or use full MIME. (And the people will never
bite the bullet, unless it is pushed down their throats...)
Btw: Perhaps you should do a posting to "linux-announce"
about this, and your motivations ?
Also do mention that for a couple days around 1st of
February all postings thru a relay at fiport.funet.fi
have caused duplicate deliveries due to SMTP timeouts
when fiport has believed the feed-session to be ok,
and the VGER has believed it to fail after the timeout..
(The fiport overloaded badly, and took eternity to
complete the SMTP reception..)
Therefore I have disabled this violation of the SMTP protocol which
has effectively broken things wildly.
People can use MIME, or emil, if they ABSOLUTELY need to transmit
8-bit characters on the list. Or you can keep to 7-bit characters.
Any mail sent to me in attempts to argue this decision will be quietly
deleted. I am not enabling a feature in vger's mailer which causes
people to not be sent list postings.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@caip.rutgers.edu
