Subject: Re: Pine cuts 8th bit away... help!

From: "Barry Bouwsma (in Košice)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 06:00:34 +0100 (MET)

Hmmm.  It appears that the news server mentioned below in this post
is failing to read this article as posted to one of its subordinates, so
I'll try posting it to a different server and see if it makes it out to
the world from there.  Apologies if it shows up more than once.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 22:47:10 +0100 (MET)
From: Barry Bouwsma <[email-masked]>
Newgroups: comp.mail.pine
Subject: Re: Pine cuts 8th bit away... help!

On Wed, 12 Oct 1994, Marko Hotti wrote:

> In the Nordic countries it is very common to get 8-bit/ISO-8859-1
> E-Mail. I already know that I cannot send 8-bit mail with Content-
> Transfer-Encoding set to 8bit but I still would like be able to
> *read* 8-bit mail with Pine.

    I have never had any problem with Pine handling 8-bit news or mail
messages, provided that...
  1)  An 8-bit-clean path exists between the sender and the point I read
from.  Note that many mails sent with C-T-E=8BIT are handled by MTAs which
lose the 8th bit without your awareness.  Also, if I try to read news
from any NNTP server in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the main gateway
to the outside world loses bit 8.  This has the result of rendering
relcom.* postings as rather difficult to read with a KOI8-R font, and
loses all C-T-E=8BIT characters in French, German, Danish, Norwegian...
  2)  An 8-bit-clean path exists between Pine and my display and I am using
the correct font.  There are a number of ways this can go wrong too, but
with proper terminal setup and stty settings, I am able to compose and
view 8-bit messages on this xterm started with xterm -font xtrek -e pine
(please ignore typos, I have no idea what I've typed)
Note that if you can correctly view C-T-E=QUOTED-PRINTABLE mail as 8-bit
data on your display, the problem is that some intermediate mailer is
losing your 8th bit, a problem which Q-P was designed to work around
until widespread adoption of 8BITMIME mailers.

Pine itself should pass 8-bit data to the path to your display unaltered,
regardless of whether you have defined an 8-bit charset.  It only matters
for composition of messages.

Barry Bouwsma, xtrek installer biking Europe
<[email-masked]>

---

From: "Barry Bouwsma (from Košice)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 11:16:47 +0100

Sigh.  It appears again that the main news hub for the Czech Republic 
is failing to pick up posted articles from the servers it feeds, so I 
must subvert the system and post outside.  Once again, apologies should 
the original posts materialize anytime in the next couple months or so.

Barry Bouwsma, losing hair