Re: tlug: =?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCRnxLXDhsGyhC?= e-mail header definitions

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "David" == J David Beutel <jdb@example.com> writes:

    David> On Sun, 7 Dec 1997, Craig Oda wrote:
    >> Maybe, Pine-J has automatic conversion of Subject line
    >> encoding?
    >> 
    >> Is it readable?

    David> Yes, in Pine-J 3.96, but not pine 3.96 (both in kterm).

Yes, in Mule, as well.

    David> Plain old pine does decode the base64 encoding (in the
    David> From: and Subject: lines at least), but then it ironically
    David> seems to "protect" us from control chars (like ESC) on its
    David> index screen, which defeats the Japanese encoding.  (I see
    David> the 2 chars ^[ rather than the real ESC char.)

I think this is toggle-able in the .pinerc, but I don't know.

    >> I was wondering if anyone knew what the proper syntax was for
    >> Japanese "Subject:" fields in the header of an e-mail message.

David's summary of Ken Lunde's discussion was accurate so I won't
recap it, but it may be useful to know that

(1) RFC-822 (reaffirmed in RFC-1123) specifies that headers of
compliant mail messages must be encoded in a 7-bit transfer encoding.
This precludes raw EUC or SJIS, but you are allowed to encode in
Base64, quoted-printable, uuencode, binhex, or anything you want as
long as it's 7 bit.
(2) RFC-MIME (RFCs 2045--2049, 2184, 2231!; there is a complete list
in file://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/rfc/rfc-index.txt) specifies how to encode
headers that flunk the RFC-822 standards, as well as how to do message
bodies and alternative parts and transfer encodings and all that kind
of stuff.

(3) Another RFC that Craig would probably want to get his hands on is
the one for IMAP; that's RFC-2060.

RFCs are _not_ easy to read.  Large portions of many of them read like 
yacc programs (well, actually augmented Backus-Naur form).  But if you 
want to understand why things happen the way they do on the Internet,
learning how to read them is essential.  Or you could just consider it 
an adventure.
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