Subject: Must all messages be coded?

From: Jacob Palme DSV <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Jun 93 16:31:02+0200

When I send messages with Pine, funny codes crop up in the
messages when they arrive to their recipients.

For example, all "=" are replaced by "=3D" and lines
with spaces before the end-of-line (which my text editor
produces very often) get the spaces converted to "=20".
People complain to me of this, they ask me why I have
such funny codes in my messages.

I guess that the reason for this is that Pine encodes
them in a MIME encoding. I am not against MIME, but is
it necessary to use MIME encodings of all messages.
Could not ordinary, plain ascii text messages be
transferred in a body part format which does not
require such encodings?

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From: Steinar Haug <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1993 17:19:27 +0200 (MET DST)

> such funny codes in my messages.

I think you have misunderstood slightly here.

These codes only show up if you use characters outside the normal 7 bit
ASCII (or ISO 646, or IA5, or whatever...) character set. And pine is
doing precisely what it should, encoding these according to MIME.

As long as you stay with 7 bit ASCII, your characters will not converted
to "funny codes" as you call them.

Steinar Haug, system/networks administrator
SINTEF RUNIT, University of Trondheim, NORWAY
Email: [email-masked], [email-masked]

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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 93 16:42:43 +0000

I had a user (one!) complain of this same problem.

I noticed that an extra line was added to the heading saying something about
encoding the message (not MIME though).

I looked at the source code and found that Pine looks at the body of the message
and applies a few tests to the text in it:

*  If all the characters are in the ASCII range 0..127 AND all the lines are <=
500 characters in length, simply send the message as plain text;

otherwise,

*  If fewer than 10% of the characters are in the ASCII range 128..255 (top bit
set -- often multinational characters) AND all the lines are <= 500 characters
in length, encode ALL non-printing characters (top bit sets AND things like Tab)
as =xx, where xx is its ASCII code expressed in hexadecimal;

otherwise,

*  treat the text as a binary file and encode all of it.

Thus if you include even one top-bit-set character ALL non printing characters
get encoded into your funny "=xx" triplets.  If the message recipient uses Pine
to view the message these get automagically converted back to their originals.
However if another mailer is used this doesn't happen and the encoding is shown
instead.

It's worth remembering that mail is intended for "plain text", i.e., characters
which don't have top-bit set (otherwise we wouldn't need ftp as well as mail!)

I'm not saying this IS your particular problem, but it was ours, which sounds at
first glance (mixing metaphors madly!) very similar.

                                                Mike Brudenell
                                                University of York, UK

>   When I send messages with Pine, funny codes crop up in
>   the messages when they arrive to their recipients.
>

---

From: Christer Lindh <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1993 07:35:49 +0200 (METDST)

> such funny codes in my messages.
Jacob, this is because you use 8-bit characters in your mail. Pine sees
this and encodes the message using "quoted printable". 

There is no support for the MIME-encoding "8bit" which can be used if you
know for sure that the path between you and the recipient is safe for
8-bit characters. That's a bug or a feature depending how you see it.
Forcing MIME-encoding will hopefully make more people convert to
MIME-readers and thus raise the demand for MIME-compliant software.
It would be nice if this was selectable when sending or composing though.

All 8-bit chars are coded as =<hex>, and thus a plain "=" needs to be
converted as well.

Long lines (>70?) chars are wrapped and a "=" placed at the end, this is
because it wants to guard the mail from evil gateways (some are known to
auto-wrap).  

What I don't understand is why this feature is mixed into the 8bit
encoding at all. This makes all mails in English prone to be mangled by
naughty gateways! 

> it necessary to use MIME encodings of all messages. 

It is necessary to encode all 8-bit characters, as gateways are known to
(and according to specs must) strip the 8th bit. Some work is being done
on SMTP to enhance the protocol with the capability to determine if the
mail can be sent in 8-bit safe mode. Then the encoding/decoding would be
done by the MTAs instead of by the user. But that is of limited use until
everyone uses it.... 

> transferred in a body part format which does not
They are already, as there are no 8-bit characters in ASCII.
But not plain ISO-8859 messages, they must be encoded.

(BTW, I just noticed a bug in Pico! I went into Help, and afterwards the
title on line 1 still reads "Help on the Pine Composer, page 1 of 13".
This is Pine 3.07)

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