Subject: enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation

From: "Sergey A. Nikolaev" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 15:58:59 +0300

Hi. I set up the enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation option, but pine 3.92
persist on MIME encoding. MTA on our IRIX is sendmail 8.6.9.
If I send an e-mail message in russian using mail program it goes fine
without MIME encoding or 8th bit striping. I tried to start sendmail with
8BITMIME option, but this didn't help.

Does anybody know how to handle it?

Thanks.

Sergey A. Nikolaev		[email-masked]
Computer Systems Department 	phone: 007-812-71-463-56
at St. Petersburg's Nuclear	fax:   007-812-71-462-56
Physics  Institute

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From: Vladimir Solnicky (Vladimír Solnický) <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 18:26:09 +0100 (MET)

> 8BITMIME option, but this didn't help.

Sendmail 8.6.* does not support 8BITMIME. You need a newer version (I
think the newest and stable enough is 8.7.5--we are runnig it here for
some time). In fact, version 8.6.9 have some serious security bugs so
there are also security reasons to upgrade. Having upgraded you have to
set the pine `smtp-server' variable to the machine running this new
sendmail (`localhost' is enough for sendmail running on the same machine.
But it is necessary to set up the mailertable using smtp8 mailer for all
domains being 8bit clean and using older sendmails (not 8.7.*) and
important to install new sendmail wherever possible.

Hope it helps.

V. S.

|  |  Bc. Vladimír Solnický  (US-ASCII: Vladimir Solnicky)
|  |  Institute of Information             UTIA AV CR
 \/   Theory and Automation                Pod vodarenskou vezi 4
Department of Computing Systems            182 08 Praha 8-Liben
+42 2 6605/2212   fax: +42 2 6884677       Czech Republic
+42 2 6605/2364   e-mail: [email-masked]   ftp.utia.cas.cz
http://www.utia.cas.cz/user_data/vs/vs-home-en.html

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From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 19:56:55 +0200

> persist on MIME encoding. MTA on our IRIX is sendmail 8.6.9.

    BSD Sendmail only started to advertise 8BITMIME starting from 8.7 --
the latest release is 8.7.5.  In order for Pine to pass the message as
C-T-E: 8BIT to the sendmail program, you must be speaking with some
ESMTP server which supports 8BITMIME (one of many ESMTP options).

    Because your 8.6.9 sendmail cannot claim 8BITMIME (talk to it with
EHLO to see what it supports), Pine resorts to doing the MIME conversion
itself.

    If you have a compiler for your SGI, you can obtain the 8.7.5 source
and compile and install.  If you do not, you may have more difficulty
locating a pre-compiled version.

    There are more than a half-dozen other MTAs I have encountered which
speak 8BITMIME, including the zmailer from Finland, PMDF, some HP
sendmail, the Emil package which has been added to sendmail 8.6 in
Scandinavian countries, and certain MTAs which lay claim to 8BITMIME
without understanding what it means.  For a review of the latter, I refer
you to comp.mail.mime (crossposted to .sendmail).  You may encounter
``problems'' in the .ru and .su domains when sending your 8BITMIME message
to others -- this has been recently discussed to death in those groups I
mention.

Barry Bouwsma, Radio Praha 8BITMIMEr
<[email-masked]>

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From: "Sergey A. Nikolaev" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 18:29:50 +0300 (MSK)

> important to install new sendmail wherever possible.
But sendmail-8.6.9 manual claims to know 8BITMIME and so does the
postscript document from the doc/op directory in sendmail's distribution.
I cann't say that I understand everything about terms 8BITMIME, ESMTP,
"Eight-bit clean", but what I can say for sure is that 8-bit mail messages
sent with the "mail" program or  sendmail (on command line) go fine
between our two our systems, one of them running sendmail-8.6.9, the other
sendmail-8.6.12. No seven bit stripping or MIME encoding occurs.
But when I use pine it always do MIME encoding on 8-bit text.
Why wouldn't pine 3.92 just pass on  8bit messages to sendmail?

Anyway I have just installed sendmail-8.7.5 on my IRIX 5.3 and set
localhost as a smtp server, but still pine does MIME encoding. What have I
missed?

Thanks.

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From: Vladimir Solnicky (Vladimír Solnický) <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 10:11:25 +0100 (MET)

On Thu, 28 Mar 1996, Sergey A. Nikolaev wrote:

> Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by rec03.pnpi.spb.ru (8.7.5/8.6.9)
>         with ESMTP id PAA02771; Thu, 28 Mar 1996 15:29:52 GMT

I think from this it works well (from pine). I think the problem is in a
different place as eplaned later in this letter

> On Wed, 27 Mar 1996, [ISO-8859-2] Vladimír Solnický wrote:
>

Maybe it does (I had never has it) but the sendmail program (version
8.6.9) does _not_ say it about itself via ESMTP protocol--thus pine does
not know the sendmail _is_ 8BITMIME.

> "Eight-bit clean", but what I can say for sure is that 8-bit mail messages

8-bit-cleans means the program never strips off the 8th bit of any byte.

ESMTP is an extension of the SMTP protocol for mail exchnge and allows
some non-standard thinks (strictly said sendaing 8bit text is illegal in
SMTP).

8BITMIME means the program is able to handle 8bit MIME
Content-Transfer-Encoding: and is able to encode it to some 7bit MIME
encoding if the recepient does not have (and claim!) this ability, too.
This is my opinion, not the cited RFC!

> sendmail-8.6.12. No seven bit stripping or MIME encoding occurs.

This depends on configuration of both sendmails so you cannot be sure
(sendaing mail) it will always be O.K.

> Why wouldn't pine 3.92 just pass on  8bit messages to sendmail?

Because the Pine Team likes conforming standards (and sending 8bit data to
programs not claiming themselves to be 8BITMIME does not conform RFC) and
because it is their program and they can do in it what they like :-)

> localhost as a smtp server, but still pine does MIME encoding. What have I

(I suppose enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation option is set) If you send mail
to a user on the same computer? If so, I cannot help you (and it should
probably be a bug in Pine). If the user is on another computer, then MIME
Quoted-Printable encoding may be done by sendmail itself (and Pine sands
it 8bit) in cases when the recepient's sendmail is not 8BITMIME (i. e.
older then 8.7.*) and smtp8 mailer is _not_ used. Thus check that:

1) All recepients' sendmails are 8BITMIME compliant (8.7.*) and when there
computers you cannot change the version

2) Change the sendmail.cf file to allow the mailertable lookup (you
probably need sendmail compiled with the -DNEWDB compiling option) and put
all domains with such 8bit-clean but not 8BITMIME sendmails it this file
(very dangerous solution is put there the whole domain .ru and .su and
change it only for subdomains not using 8-bit-cleans sendmails). Details
are in the sendmail (i think) cf/cf/README or cf/README manuals.

Hope it helps

V. S.

P. S.  You may send me a testing letter containing 8bit data as I have an
8BITMIME sendmail to address ([email-masked]). Then I will reply you if it
comes 8bit or QP encoded.

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From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 03:37:55 +0200

On 28 Mar 1996, "Sergey A. Nikolaev" wrote:

> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-5

(Just curious -- does 8859-5 see much use in .ru/.su ?  I was under the
impression that KOI8-R was almost the only MIME charset seeing widespread
use...)

>  what I can say for sure is that 8-bit mail messages

    What you see here is what is commonly referred to as ``JustSend8'',
which is the only thing non-MIME programs can do to pass non-ASCII data,
with the result that you pray it arrives intact.  Sometimes it doesn't.

> localhost as a smtp server, but still pine does MIME encoding. What have I

    At the risk of distracting myself even more from the daily drudgery of
work, I will volunteer to receive your mail to verify that you are sending
it 8BITMIME, or to identify the machines which prevent this from
happening.  Both my mailbox hosts speak 8BITMIME properly, so you can
address a sample 8-bit mail message to <[email-masked]> or
<[email-masked]>.

    This offer also goes for anyone else who thinks they have problems
with Pine and 8-bit mail, but please spare me from being fired for
unproductivity by first verifying your Pine is configured to negotiate
8-bit ESMTP, and that you are talking to 8.7 sendmail or equivalent.

    Even if I can get your mail with all 8 bits intact and cause everyone
else here to turn white as I switch the display font to a giant Cyrillic
font ;-) , this doesn't mean that all your recipients will.  As Vladimír
noted, you will probably want to modify your sendmail so that it delivers
to all .ru and .su machines with JustSend8 so others don't complain about
unreadable MIME, while I suggest you be conservative and follow the
8BITMIME spec when sending to other domains which are more likely to
suffer 8th-bit stripping.  But this is only a workaround for the real
solution which is to encourage as many people as possible to upgrade to an
8.7 sendmail or comparable MTA with 8BITMIME support.

Barry Bouwsma
Radio Pravda