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Re: Attachment altered because of 7 bit (none) encoding.



On 2005-12-05 10:37:01 -0600, Bo Peng wrote:
> I am not an expert on mail server/client like you guys. What happened
> to me is that if I send such an email to myself, in my
> /var/mail/myusername, I do see double dots added (what is so called
> "the other side"?).

If you store the mail directly to /var/mail/myusername, then you're
not using SMTP, and there won't be double dots. On the contrary, if
you're using SMTP, then there's a SMTP client and a SMTP server;
the SMTP client will double the dot and the SMTP server will do the
opposite transformation.

> I guess then it should be mail clients' responsibility to remove
> these dots.

Just SMTP servers. RFC 2821 says:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.5.2 Transparency

   Without some provision for data transparency, the character sequence
   "<CRLF>.<CRLF>" ends the mail text and cannot be sent by the user.
   In general, users are not aware of such "forbidden" sequences.  To
   allow all user composed text to be transmitted transparently, the
   following procedures are used:

   -  Before sending a line of mail text, the SMTP client checks the
      first character of the line.  If it is a period, one additional
      period is inserted at the beginning of the line.

   -  When a line of mail text is received by the SMTP server, it checks
      the line.  If the line is composed of a single period, it is
      treated as the end of mail indicator.  If the first character is a
      period and there are other characters on the line, the first
      character is deleted.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mutt is not a SMTP server, just a mail user agent.

> If this can not be the default behavior of mutt, can it be an option
> like default_encoding?

I'd vote against. This would bloat Mutt and make it behave incorrectly
when reading some folders such as =sent.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA