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Re: [leafnode-list] Why was support for 8 bit characters in headers



Matthias Andree <ma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> > In the dk.* and no.* regional hierarchies at least, posting those munged
> > headers is the surest path available to killfiles and flame wars. The
> 
> Oh, and omitting RFC-compliant encoding is going to get you nasty
> bashing in de.*, so there ;-)

Yes, I'm aware that practices vary. Trust me, character set issues
have been beaten to death in the no.* hierarchy rather more thoroughly
than in most other places. The 8 bit consensus was reached at a time
when the only other alternative visible on the horizon was base64
quoted-printable (aka quoted-unreadable), and was seen as a reasonable
easily-converted-to option. Several years on, we see that flag days
might have been acceptable before Microsoft entered the Usenet problem
set, but today we unfortunately have to deal with an installed
base. In short, with the current leafnode I am unable to follow up to
a significant subset of the threads in the no.* hierarchy.

> Well, sending anything other than US-ASCII or UTF-8 out in headers is
> plain broken. I may add an option to let garbage out, with a warning
> attached to the header, similar to the X-Authentication-Warning that
> sendmail uses under certain circumstances.

I would advocate an option to allow sending of 8 bit characters in
headers on a per hierarchy basis. Allowing 8-bit for hierarchies such
as no.* which for historical reasons will need them for quite some
time to come, makes sense to me. Possibly supplemented by silently
converting 8-bit characters to whatever is considered acceptable
elsewhere for hierarchies where the config file does not say it is
explicitly permitted.

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/	http://www.datadok.no/


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