Re: [Nmh-workers] Request Deprecation of mts.conf's mmdelim1 and mmdelim2.

[Jon Fairbairn]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:

>>No, it always was in band - the 4-SOH sequence was searched for in all
>>lines of the message, and SOH has always been a possible character in
>>e-mail.   Just even more unlikely years ago than it is now.
>
> You know, I _was_ going to disagree here but Robert is, as he almost
> always is, 100% correct.  4-SOH is not valid in an email HEADER
> (mostly), but it is certainly valid in a message BODY, and this goes all
> the way back to RFC 822.  There were some minor changes along the way
> (RFC 822 said NULs were valid, but RFC 2822 said they were not), but SOH
> has always been a valid character in email bodies; MIME didn't change
> this one bit.

Well, gosh. I stand corrected; I should have read RFC 822 before
making that decision (back whenever it was). I can only assume
that I had based it on what I thought was allowed in mail before
RFC822. If I had been designing SMTP I wouldn’t have allowed all
128 ASCII characters. The first 8 would have been forbidden, for
a start. Then we could have used ETX to mark the end of the
body, and not <CRLF>.<CRLF>, which can legitimately appear in a
text message. But I wasn’t, so they weren’t and we couldn’t. Oh
well.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 address@hidden