On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Roger H. Goun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> * Decode BASE64 or quoted-printable to 7-bit clean plain text > > This should be decode to 8-bit clean plain text.
Nope. Not if you're talking strict RFC-821/822 compliance. The specs say ASCII. ASCII is properly a 7-bit character code. The RFC reinforces this, going so far as to give acceptable character code values as 1 through 127. RFC-822, Section 3.3. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822#section-3.3 After all, if someone really wants that genuine 1982 email experience, I would hate for them to be disappointed. ;-) > These could be merged into: > * Replace non-ASCII characters with an ASCII text representation As you touched upon, I was thinking certain Unicode characters are in common use *and* have a convenient ASCII equivalent, and those could be handled with a lookup table. However, Unicode characters not in that table, and just plain unrecognizable non-ASCII data, would have to be handled in a generic fashion. For example, here are some easy translations: * Unicode Non-Break Space ==> ASCII space * Unicode Em Dash ==> ASCII sequence -- * Unicode Left Double Quote ==> ASCII Double Quote (non-directional) But something like Unicode U+2654, "White Chess King", doesn't have an easy ASCII representation, and it doesn't see common use, so it likely would not be worth worrying about. But a proper solution should indicate that something was there, and was removed. One simple approach is to replace any such characters with an ASCII representation of the numeric character value. For example, take U+25A1, Unicode "White Square". That could be translated as follows: X□X ==> X[0x25][0xA1]X Not pretty, but easy, and allows manual translation back to the proper code point, if needed. > You probably want the mail to remain a valid MIME message, just in > case the user ever upgrades her MUA. Leaving the MIME headers when the explict goal is to remove all MIME functionality seems like a waste to me. They can never be used for anything useful. I would think it better to make it clear that this isn't MIME. But hey, I can't volunteering to write the code. ;-) -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/