Subject: Re: send 8bit text without encode?

From: [email-masked] (Holger Lillqvist)
Date: 26 Sep 1996 15:36:48 GMT

Qin An wrote:
>I'd like send 8bit text (other languages mixed with English) in PINE
>without any encode, neither base64 nor quoted-printable. But I can't
>find how to config PINE to do that. Is it possible in PINE?

No it is not, and that seems to be due the Pine team's deliberate policy
regarding 8-bit. I asked the same question as you in a local Finnish
newgroup, and got an answer with the following material:

http://www.cac.washington.edu:1180/pine/pine-info/95.04/msg00433.html
>
> On 19 Apr 1995, Ulrich Windl wrote:
> 
> > In an elder PINE you could use charset = ASCII, and PINE would not touch the
> > 8-bit characters. Only if you use ISO Latin-1 Pine converts characters.
> >
> Official answer:
> 
> Pine is based on, and tries hard to adhere to, Internet mail standards.
> Current Internet mail standards do not permit sending unencoded 8bit
> characters except when an 8bit connection has been negotiated via ESMTP.
> 
> Unfortunately, not eveyone agrees with the current Internet standards.  There
> are areas in the world where it is considered acceptable to violate the
> standards and "just send 8" even without a negotiated 8bit connection.
> Regrettably, a few have even created "outlaw" versions of Pine that violate
> the standard, but no official version of Pine has ever done so.  (At
> least not intentionally.)
> 
> Version 3.92 will support negotiated 8bit connections via ESMTP's
> 8BITMIME construct.
> 
> -teg

-- 
[email-masked]
University of Helsinki * Nordica / Institute of literature

---

From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 05:43:48 +0800 (GMT)

> http://www.cac.washington.edu:1180/pine/pine-info/95.04/msg00433.html

[snip] 

> > Version 3.92 will support negotiated 8bit connections via ESMTP's

pine is now at 3.95 and as the link promised......8bit is possible 
when ESMTP support is available....

An excerpt from the help menu (after doing "Information Reasearch"  :-) )
shows:

        FEATURE: enable-8bit-to-smtp-server
 
This feature affects Pine's behavior when sending mail.  Internet
standards
require that all electronic mail messages traversing the global Internet
consist of 7bit ASCII characters unless a pair of cooperating mail 
transfer agents explicitly agree to allow 8bit messages.  In general, 
then, exchanging messages in non-ASCII characters requires MIME encoding.
 
However, there are now Internet standards that allow for unencoded 8bit
exchange of messages between cooperating systems.  Setting this feature
tells Pine to try to negotiate unencoded 8bit transmission during the
sending process.  Should the negotiation fail, Pine will fall back to its
ordinary encoding rules. 
 
Note, this feature relies on your system's mail transport agent or
configured "smtp-server" having the negotiation mechanism introduced in
"Extended SMTP" (ESMTP) and the specific extension called "8BITMIME". 

Hope this helps.....

-- 
Edward M. Greshko                       Technical Manager, Electronic Commerce
                                        Control Data Asia/Pacific Region
Voice: +886-2-715-2222 x287             6/F, 131 Nanking East Road, Section 3
FAX  : +886-2-712-9197                  Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C

---

From: [email-masked] (Qin An)
Date: 26 Sep 1996 11:54:31 GMT

Hello,

Thank you in advance,

Qin

---

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 11:51:18 -0400

> find how to config PINE to do that. Is it possible in PINE?

    You can try, although there is no guarantee that you will be
successful every time, simply because worldwide Internet standards 
are still 7-bit.

    However, if your version of Pine is recent (I forget when the
feature came in), from the Main Menu go into Setup and Config.  Scroll
down to enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation and be sure to read the online
help screen.  You should also probably specify a character set other
than USASCII.  With the 8-bit feature enabled, Pine will TRY to
negotiate an unmodified 8-bit transmission.  If the negotiation is
succcessful, Pine will send your message unmodified 8-bit.  If the
negotiation fails, Pine will fall back to its standard 7-bit encodings,
such as Quoted-Printable or base64.

    Note that this depends in large measure on the receiving system and
the transmission path (possibly), so there is no assurance that it will
work every time.  (I think that successful 8-bit transmission also
requires a compatible mail transfer agent on your system.)

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
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