Ken Yap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 01:43:42 +0100
>From: G�nter Grass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: Identifier
>
>[body of mail]
>
>When I try to repl to this I get:
>
>repl: bad addresses:
>        G�nter Grass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- missing mailbox (�)
>
>When I try to scan it I get:
>
>   1+ 03/16 G nter Grass <gue  Re: Identifier<<[body of mail]
>
>I know I should check nmh 1.0 first but are such characters legal in
>headers according to the RFC or is his mail program broken for not
>encoding them?

His MUA is broken: e-mail message headers may only contain ascii (7bit)
characters.  Characters outside of ascii can be encoded via the rules
in rfc2047 and rfc2231.  I do not know whether nmh-1.0 supports rfc2047
or not, and I'm sure it doesn't support the extensions (e.g., language
specification) in rfc2231.

I can name at least MUA which crashes upon receipt of a message which
has characters in the header whose 8th bit is set.


>Could/should nmh be a bit more forgiving and treat those
>characters with accents as alphabetics?

Determining whether a byte represents an accented character requires
knowledge of the character set.  That's much of the point of rfc2047:
it requires that a character set be specified with the encoded
characters so that they can be interpreted correctly.


Philip Guenther

----------------------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                UNIX Systems and Network Administrator
Gustavus Adolphus College       St. Peter, MN 56082-1498
Source code never lies: it just misleads (Programming by Purloined Letter?)

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