[Zope3-Users] Re: UnicodeEncodeErrors from zope/app/maildir.py

[Martijn Pieters]

On 11/29/06, Raphael Ritz <r.ritz at biologie.hu-berlin.de> wrote:
> The mail's body or pay load on the other hand can have
> any encoding.

Nonsense. From RFC 2822, section 2.1:

   At the most basic level, a message is a series of characters.  A
   message that is conformant with this standard is comprised of
   characters with values in the range 1 through 127 and interpreted as
   US-ASCII characters [ASCII].  For brevity, this document sometimes
   refers to this range of characters as simply "US-ASCII characters".

   Note: This standard specifies that messages are made up of characters
   in the US-ASCII range of 1 through 127.  There are other documents,
   specifically the MIME document series [RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2047,
   RFC2048, RFC2049], that extend this standard to allow for values
   outside of that range.  Discussion of those mechanisms is not within
   the scope of this standard.

In other words, the MIME RFCs tell you how to encode your message in
such a way that the message body, the characters that go across the
wire, fall within the ASCII range. MIME uses a transfer encoding like
quoted-printable to ensure this.

-- 
Martijn Pieters