Received: from localhost by CS.UTK.EDU with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id EAA12055; Thu, 1 Jun 1995 04:31:59 -0400 X-Resent-To: drums@CS.UTK.EDU ; Thu, 1 Jun 1995 04:31:57 EDT Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU Received: from Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU by CS.UTK.EDU with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id EAA12048; Thu, 1 Jun 1995 04:31:56 -0400 Received: from UW-Gateway.Panda.COM by Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (NX5.67e/UW-NDC Revision: 2.27.MRC ) id AA09296; Thu, 1 Jun 95 01:31:50 -0700 Received: from localhost by Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM (NX5.67e/UW-NDC/Panda Revision: 2.27.MRC ) id AA19264; Thu, 1 Jun 95 01:31:44 -0700 Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 01:25:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Mark Crispin Sender: Mark Crispin Subject: end-of-message indication in SMTP To: drums@CS.UTK.EDU Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII There is an interoperability problem in SMTP. A certain inferior losing MTA, which shall go nameless but whose name rhymes with bendmail, treats . to be the end of a message. This causes an interoperability problem if . is actual data in a message. Double-dot quoting doesn't work, since is not an Internet newline and thus would not de-quote on systems which implement this properly. Recommendations: 1) Message text which contains . SHOULD be MIME-encoded as either BASE64 or QUOTED-PRINTABLE. 2) SMTP clients MUST NOT transmit when Internet newline is intended. 3) SMTP servers MUST NOT interpret as Internet newline.