On 2000-12-01 07:55:05 -0500, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Sendmail has been rewriting 8bit to quoted-printable content for
> decades, when relaying 8bit mail to 7bit-only relays. This
> involves rewriting both the headers and the actual content of the
> MIME section. Of course MTAs are free to rewrite both headers
> and contents. Sendmail was doing this right from the beginning.
First of all, sendmail has of course not done that "from the
beginning", since it's considerably older than MIME. That MIME
rewriting stuff is a rather new invention, and can arguably be
considered a bad design.
> Interesting. RFC 1847 would seem to require the sending mail
> client to telepathically determine, in advance, whether all mail
> relays that will pass along this message, at some point in the
> future, will be capable of handling the message's chosen
> encoding.
RFC 1847 mandates very strict restrcitions on the encodings to be
used when sending multipart/signed (i.e., 7bit only), so this is not
an issue. (But you could have easily found out about this yourself,
just by reading that standard.)
> And, if the mail relay cannot accomodate the message's transfer
> encoding, there's no choice but to bounce the mail, because you
> can't rewrite it even thuogh you technically can? Gee, what a
> "secure" concept.
Please, try reading and understanding the specifications before.
>> Please also note that this does not only affect PGP/MIME, but
>> S/MIME and MOSS as well.
> I must've imagined all the PGP-signed messages I've been sending
> all these years, with nary a problem.
Let me guess - you have never ever used S/MIME's multipart/signed,
and you are using old-style PGP messages, right?
> Bottom line: RFC 1847 is broken. It breaks several decades'
> worth of established mail protocols and conventions.
This is nonsense. Please try getting a clue about e-mail standards
before you start coding.
--
Thomas Roessler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
