Re: [NTLK] Special characters in owner info allowed?

From: Peter H. Coffin (hellsop_at_ninehells.com)
Date: Thu Aug 19 2004 - 06:50:29 PDT


On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 09:02:31AM -0400, Victor Rehorst wrote:
> Frank Gruendel wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I do have the impression that some mail servers do not allow special
> > characters in the "from" fields of sent mail. This does not mean the
> > sender's email address itself, but the part of the "From" field that
> > is taken from the Newton's owner info.
> >
> > Does anybody know if this is true or not true? I had an owner in
> > "owner info" whose last name contained an umlaut, and I received a
> > SMTP error from freenet.de: 550 syntax error in header. I changed
> > the umlaut to "ue" and this time the mail was accepted.
>
> My hypothesis is that the Newton (or, more likely, your mail
> transport) doesn't do any character set conversion on the name when it
> puts it into the From header. The RFC for SMTP states that all SMTP
> commands and replies must be in the 7-bit US-ASCII character set.

Right. Some servers will let one get away with it, by doing a conversion
for you, but many will reject it. If Mail V doesn't do the conversion
already, and someone wants to make it do it right, the rules for headers
are here:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt

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