John Levine: > >Isn't that exactly Exim and qmail (and perhaps others) have been > >doing all along: accept 8BITMIME mail, and send it to 7bit MTAs > >without return-to-sender or 8-to-7 downgrade? > > If they do, it's a bug. Since a 7 bit MTA will typically lose the > high bit, it would be more honest just to throw the mail away, since > there's little chance it'll arrive in usable form.
See http://bugs.exim.org/show_bug.cgi?id=817; qmail has no bugs :-) While corruption may have been a problem 15 years ago, nowadays non-8BITMIME servers are more likely than not to be 8-bit clean. There are some measurements in the last comments of exim bug 817. > In any event, EAI is what it is. If you don't think it's useful to > support non-ASCII mail addresses, you don't have to implement it. I expect to do a full implementation including compatibility with RFC532[12]. The spec was cleaned up significantly, so it is good that I declined to start work on this in 2008/9. Wietse
