On Fri, 25 Oct 1996 17:04:01 -0400 Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]> said: >I'm not sure where to point fingers here... is this a LSoft problem, the >origin mailer, or an RFC ambiguity? I see multiple problems here. 1. The basic premise of MIME is that you shouldn't need to have to update MTAs all over the network in order for MIME to work. This means that the fields you generate, which will be interpreted as unknown/comment fields by MTAs which don't have any specific support for MIME, need to be written in such a way that they still work when treated like a comment field by a MTA, because this is exactly what will happen. If you put a space in a comment field, you have to expect that the field may be folded at this location. Comments are defined as '*text' in RFC822, and the definition of 'text' specifically states that "quoted-strings are NOT recognized" (emphasis not mine). So, you should not put spaces in MIME fields where you wouldn't get the correct/expected results if the field were folded at this location. 2. Due to #1, most MTAs do not have any specific support for MIME. Even new MTAs are likely to treat MIME fields like any other regular field, because they don't need to do any special processing on them. Indeed there are a lot of people who think that MIME is a MUA to MUA convention and MTAs should not get involved (and a lot of people who think otherwise). Not treating MIME fields in any special way is, however, clearly allowable. 3. Some MTAs do have specific MIME support because their authors decided that it was appropriate for the MTA to rewrite MIME messages under certain circumstances (which is a controversial point, as noted above). You then get errors like: 553 header syntax error, line " =_0_MIME_Boundary_21244.3270e308.i mhwt300.dcuh029.dcu.ps.net"": No such file or directory 553 is a fatal syntax error, which incidentally is not allowed after DATA. Either way it means that the message will NOT be delivered because the MIME-capable MTA has decided that the recipient will not be able to make any use of it. As a matter of fact the message in question was plain text and, while it might not have looked as nice as if the problem were not present, it is definitely readable by a human being. Unfortunately the in-transit MTA took it upon itself to bounce the message, instead of letting the receiving MUA decide whether the message is usable or not. This seems totally inappropriate to me, especially as the recipient might not even have a MIME MUA and the field in question might be totally meaningless to the MUA being used. Eric