[Reportbug-maint] Bug#539157: direct SMTP send violates RFC1652 and sends unencoded 8-bit data

[Sandro Tosi]

Hi Thorsten,
thanks for the report.

disclaimer: I'm not a MUA/MTA expert.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 15:51, Thorsten Glaser<tg at mirbsd.de> wrote:
> Package: reportbug
> Version: 4.5
> Severity: normal
>
> I almost always use reportbug in direct SMTP mode, as I do not configure
> a local MTA on the systems I run it on, which usually are chroots.
>
> The bug reports get submitted to rietz.debian.org, which does not adver-
> tise 8BITMIME in its EHLO response – yet reportbug fails to encode the
> eMail body with quoted-printable or base64.
>
> Then, rietz passes the messages to, for example, the *@mirbsd.org
> servers, which do not advertise 8BITMIME either, but strip bit7 from
> incoming mail. This is mostly a historic setup, originally intended
> to “protect” the MDA and MUA. The message gets mangled badly (I’ve
> seen quite some bad ones).
>
> The mbox view on the Debian BTS clearly shows the 8bit characters,
> in this case UTF-8, in the mbox (RFC822) format. While RFC2822 may
> allow these things, RFC1652 (not obsoleted yet) explicitly states:
>
>   If a server SMTP does not support the 8-bit MIME transport extension
>   (either by not responding with code 250 to the EHLO command, or by
>   not including the EHLO keyword value 8BITMIME in its response), then
>   the client SMTP must not, under any circumstances, attempt to
>   transfer a content which contains characters outside the US-ASCII
>   octet range (hex 00-7F).
>
> Thus, reportbug MUST be fixed to encode the eMail body prior to sending.

so:

- should we encode using quoted-printable or base64?
- should we encode only when sending to reportbug.d.o (the default
smtp host) or to any other smtp?
- what if an encoded message is sent to an 8bit (we're in 2009 and
we're still talking about 8/7 bit stuff...) capable smtp host?
- is there a way to programmatically identify 8bit capable smtp host
from ehlo message?

> Please see ↓ as well:
> ‣ http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2009/07/cult-of-workarounds.html
>
> Note that this bug report contains quite some 「Unicode」 characters ☺
> I w̲i̲l̲l̲ send the mail as received by my MX as a follow-up to this PR.

and I see them correctly.

-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi