Subject: Re: Please, help me with 8bit subjects in Pine.

From: Jungshik Shin <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 Sep 1996 16:44:39 -0400

Alexander S. Urakov <[email-masked]> wrote:

: If I use russian characters in subject field pine converts them to MIME
: encoded string and I can read this subject only on the same version of
: Pine. Most users in our country use mail packages which allow to display
: only 8bit plain text in Subject and message body. So how can I force Pine
: to send Subject in 8bit plain text format?? And without -- [KOI8-R] at 
: begin of line??

   Sorry, it's impossible. 8bit characters in mail header including
Subject is explicitely prohibited by RFC 1522 and STD 10/11 and
Pine strictly adheres to those standard and doesn't allow 8bit
characters in mail header without B/Q encoding as specified in
RFC 1522. You'd better ask your correspondents to get
MIME-compliant mail user agent/POP3 client like Pine,Netscape-Mail,
MS Internet Mail,MIME-enabled Elm which have no trouble decoding
B/Q encoded header.

    Jungshik Shin

---

From: Jungshik Shin <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Sep 1996 11:28:50 -0400

Jungshik Shin <[email-masked]> wrote:
: Alexander S. Urakov <[email-masked]> wrote:

: : Pine. Most users in our country use mail packages which allow to display
: : only 8bit plain text in Subject and message body. So how can I force Pine
: : to send Subject in 8bit plain text format?? And without -- [KOI8-R] at 
: : begin of line??

:    Sorry, it's impossible. 8bit characters in mail header including
: Subject is explicitely prohibited by RFC 1522 and STD 10/11 and
: Pine strictly adheres to those standard and doesn't allow 8bit
: characters in mail header without B/Q encoding as specified in

   I guess it's not so bad an idea to add options,
'Allow 8bit header in News posting' and 'Allow
8bit  header in mail message' since sometimes 
sending 8bit header is necessary as in case of recipients without
MIME-compliant MUAs   although '8bit header' is prohibited.
News article can make a better case for allowing 8bit header
as all but few news server have trouble passing through
8bit characters in both header and body of articles and 
in some part of the world as (implicitely) permitted(?)
in "son of RFC 1036", it's established that both header
and body can contain 8bit characters and quite many news
readers cannot handle B/Q encoded header, making a good case
for a new option 'allow 8bit header in news posting'.
These two options are already used in other Mail/News
reader like MS Internet News/Mail and Tin 1.3 unoff-beta.

   Jungshik Shin

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 12:34:48 -0700 (PDT)

Safe transfer of 8bit characters is only one of the issues.
Another is the charset labelling.

Unless a sender (either naively or arrogantly) assumes that all recipients
of a message use the same charset as the sender, it must be idenitified
in the header/text.  RFC-1522 specifies how to do that, and the need for 
charset labelling makes MIME essential even if you postulate an 8bit-clean
transmission path.

-teg

---

From: Jungshik Shin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 16:22:34 -0400 (EDT)

> charset labelling makes MIME essential even if you postulate an 8bit-clean

  Yes, it's essential to label charset used in header. Sometimes,
however, giving users to choose what to do with 8bit chars in header
(let them decide whether or not put 8bit chars encoded or as they are)
is not a bad idea. That's even more the case for local news groups or
particular set of newsgroups in which particular language/charset is
assumed to be used. Yet Another Newswatcher for Mac let users specifiy
primary charset per newsgroup basis( i.e. For major six
hierarchies,fr.*,de.*,and many Western European groups, use ISO-8859-1,
han.* for  EUC-KR, fj.* for ISO-2022-JP, etc) , so that fonts
corresponding to predesignated charset for a particular newsgroup is
used automatically without relying on header information, which is
sometimes incorrect either due to misconfiguration by user or inability
of program and/or ignorance of programmer to put charset name other than
ISO-8859-1 in the header). This is quite a nice idea, IMHO. Of course,
those primary charsets should be overridable for particular news article.
The same mechanism can be used in Pine.  If RFC 1522 style-information
about charset is missing, assume 8bit chars in header are those in
primary charset for that news group.  Although less desirable for mail
than for news article, similar thing can be done with mail message.

  I understand it's pretty tough to decide whether to give users more
freedom or force(?) them to stick to the standard and that Pine has been
on the latter side in most cases. As far as I know, however, allowing
8bit chars in news header is not so grave a violation of the standard as
using 8bit chars in mail header mostly because standard/RFCs regarding
news article format are outdated and even some RFC-to-be(son of 1036)
states that it's permissable to use 8bit  chars in closed circle of
newsgroups(e.g. local hierarchy. han.* newsgroups have used 8bit  EUC-KR
in both header and body from the beginning without any problem).

   Jungshik Shin