af%sei.ucl.ac.be@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU ("Alain FONTAINE ", Postmaster - NAD) (05/11/89)
May I ask your indulgence for this little request for information about the DDN mail protocols : both RFC821 and RFC822 limit the usable character set to '128 ASCII characters'. For RFC821, this limitation concerns not only the envelope, but also the content which is not interpreted at all, except for looking for the 'CRLF . CRLF' sequence. For RFC822, the limitation concerns not only the header, but also the body which is not interpreted in any way. Given the fact that TCP offers full octet transport, my stupid questions are : 1- Are the limitations still specified (in order words, has there been a relaxation at some later time)? 2- If question 1 yields a 'yes', are those limitations in fact enforced by the implementations? 3- If question 2 also yields a 'yes', why is it that one may not use an 8 bit alphabet derived by extension from ASCII for mail (did somebody say 'ISO8859' out there ?) ? I really hope I have overlooked something, and would be delighted to be corrected by anyone who knows better than me. Thanks. Alain FONTAINE +--------------------------------+ Universite Catholique de Louvain | If your mail software barks at | Service d'Etudes Informatiques | my address, you may try : | Batiment Pythagore | | Place des Sciences, 4 | FNTA80@BUCLLN11.BITNET | B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, BELGIUM +--------------------------------+ phone +32 (10) 47-2625