On Thu, 22 Feb 1996 00:53:39 -0500 Dan Wheeler <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>The switch  back and forth between  Kanji and ASCII is  controlled by an
>escape sequence.  In order  for this  to work  with LISTSERV  lists, the
>"Translate=  No"  list  keyword  must   be  specified.  The  default  of
>"Translate= Yes" causes  LISTSERV to delete control  characters from the
>messages. Escape  sequences do not  work well  when the <esc>  codes are
>deleted. ;-)
 
All right,  "Translate= Yes" would  remove the  ESC code, but  sending an
unencoded ASCII control  character in an e-mail message  and expecting it
to be  unaltered sounds *very* optimistic  to me. While I've  always said
that MTAs that  aren't 8-bit clean are brain  damaged, control characters
are another story. Most file viewers for instance will strip them off, to
prevent the contents of the message  from taking control of your terminal
settings  (which  with  "intelligent"  terminals is  actually  a  serious
security  risk -  you can  program a  function key  to do  'rm -Rf  *' or
whatever, and  then press it!) And  when going through an  EBCDIC system,
you  can be  pretty sure  that  the control  character will  come out  as
something mostly unrelated. Surely there must  be an option to encode the
message using MIME. It will look  like gibberish to people without a MIME
reader, but then a message in Japanese would probably look like gibberish
to someone without the right tools to display the original characters :-)
 
  Eric