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Subject: 
Re: Posting with MIME encoded FROM header
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Tue, 19 Jan 1999 13:48:19 GMT
Viewed: 
1090 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.test, Fredrik Glöckner <fredrik.glockner@bio.uio.no>
writes:

Posting with a MIME encoded FROM header causes some problems.  Actually
the article is rejected because the server does not recognize me.
E.g. this FROM header would be rejected:

    From: Fredrik =?iso-8859-1?q?Gl=F6ckner?= <fredrik.glockner@bio.uio.no>

Now, I'm not sure if MIME encoding of header lines is a good idea, but
do you not agree that the header should nevertheless be accepted?

Hmm, I don't know.  At first I want to say no it shouldn't -- because it's
totally unreadable with that encoding.  But OTOH, maybe yes it should,
because maybe modern newsreaders are smart enough to decode that into 8-bit
ISO characters on the screen and not show garbage squiggly encoding
characters.  But I bet that's hoping too much.  :-)

I suspect this problem is going to become increasingly observed as more and
more people come onboard with ISO-8859-1 characters above 128.  Some mail
delivery agents hate unencoded ISO-8859-1 characters above 128 -- meaning
that you can't always simply put a plain umlaut-o right into your name.

Perhaps the newsserver should simply do a quick decoding pass on article
headers to look for ISO-8859-1 encodings, to change...

   From: Fredrik =?iso-8859-1?q?Gl=F6ckner?= <fredrik.glockner@bio.uio.no>

...into...

   From: Fredrik Glöckner <fredrik.glockner@bio.uio.no>

...before injecting the article.  That way, the article would be stored on
the server using native ISO-8859-1 encoding rather than the unreadable
ASCIIfications.

It probably goes against the NNTP spec to munge the From line like that, but
if the following headers are also present (and added if not present)...

   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

...then everything should be OK.

Anyone have a Perl5 regex which detects and decodes ISO-8851-1 encodings
from 7-bit ASCII into 8-bit ISO-8859-1 pseudo-ASCII?

--Todd

p.s.  I've also seen ISO-8859-1 encodings show up in 'Organization' and
other headers...



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Posting with MIME encoded FROM header
 
(...) This was my first reaction as well. It has always been considered bad and ugly to post anything MIME encoded on news. But as you say yourself, this practice is becoming increasingly common, so you are probably going to be be confronted with it (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jan-99, to lugnet.admin.general)

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