Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] Suggestions for FormMail.pl

[Steven M. <nm...@ap...>]

Regarding adding a Content-Type header to submitted data email messages:

Jonathan Stowe wrote:

>Well, yes but the content is actually still assumed to be encoded as 7,
>the rfc you cited earlier doesn't make any provision for this. I think
>  
>
The content of an email body MUST to be 7-bit for the old fashioned
RFC-821/822 SMTP servers, and for them, yes the content must be encoded
"quoted printable" or something, and the Content-Transfer-Encoding and
Content-Type headers should be set appropriately. FormMail is currently
broken for these servers because it doesn't do that.

Servers can indicate that they can accept messages that contain 8-bit
bytes in the body. An RFC defining this capability, 8BITMIME, for was
published in 1994:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8BITMIME

Some mail servers already implement this. For these mail servers, it is
sufficient to simply add the correct content-type header describing the
body of the email message. If the mail server needs to relay the mail to
a server that does not support 8BITMIME, then the RFCs say that it is
the servers job to transfer encode the message body:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html

My opinion is
1/ Adding the header doesn't make things more broken than they are already.
2/ The most common case is that the sending ESMTP server will support
8BITMIME extension.
3/ Adding the header is a valuable clue for receiving mail clients for
the common case.
4/ Doing a proper transfer encoding would be a significant change to a
dead-end script, so not worth persuing?

Regarding older versions of Perl -- I'm not sure how older versions of
Perl will change the decoding of the 8-bit characters.

The behaviour that they need to handle is this: If my HTML form is in
charset 8859-15, then the Euro symbol is encoded as %A4 (by the
browser); if the charset is UTF-8 the Euro is %E2%82%AC. CGI.pm decodes
these back to bytes when the form is received. As long as Perl 5
supports 8-bit characters, I don't see how it can know to convert them
to any other representation, it just needs to package the bytes
unchanged in to the email, and with the Content-Type header, I'm happy :-)

I hope that's interesting and helpful to you!

Steven