gnu@hoptoad.UUCP (10/21/86)
[Further discussion should move to net.mail.] In article <755@mtune.UUCP>, jhc@mtune.UUCP (Jonathan Clark) writes: > >How can you send binaries in mail? > You could if /bin/mail supported a logical separation between a letter > and its envelope.... do any other mail > subsystems support this separation so that binaries could be mailed? Yes, the Arpanet mail standard (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP, described in RFC [Request for Comments] #821) separates the text and the header information. It specifically allows any of the 128 possible 7-bit characters to be sent, and does a trivial encoding to allow the "end of text" marker to appear in messages. It requires that 7-bit USASCII be used, however, which makes things hard on people in Europe and Asia. I note that Sendmail has a bug which does not allow ASCII NUL (0x00) to be sent. This is in violation of RFC 821. In article <7242@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes: > > What happens if the string > > "\nFrom" appears in te binary? Shouldn't the user agent or > > delivery system or someone be inserting a '>' before the From? > > Yup. Actually, the mail transport system should not care about "From "s in things. When it gets to the far end, IF it is being delivered to a mailbox that used "\nFrom " to delimit messages, then the far end has to worry about this. Lettuce work towards making all the software transparent, then when someone writes a final delivery program that uses a different format (e.g. delivers straight to an MH folder, which keeps each message in a separate file), the whole thing will work. Note that local mail delivery is not built in to sendmail -- you can change sendmail.cf to have it call /bin/foomail rather than /bin/mail and it really won't care. -- John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa (C) Copyright 1986 by John Gilmore. May the Source be with you!