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Question:

Does MailMan support 8BITMIME?

Apr 16 '14 at 10:37

Hi, How could I send a 8BITMIME message with MailMan? Thanks


Answer

The answer is Yes, but you'll need to be more specific as to exactly what you need.

Do you need the content-transfer-encoding of an attachment to be "8bit" instead of "base64"? Or... do you need the content-transfer-encoding of the plain-text and/or HTML bodies to be "8bit"?

If an attachment with binary (non-text) data is to use 8bit, then you cannot handle the MIME as a string -- you can only handle it as a byte array -- because the binary bytes do not represent characters. To handle the MIME as a string in your program, binary data would need to be encoded in a string representable form such as Base64 or Quoted-Printable.

If a plain-text or HTML body is to be 8bit, you can still handle the MIME as a string, but the string, if written to a file (such as a .eml) would need to be written using the correct character encoding (utf-8, iso-8859-1, etc.). When a plain-text or HTML body is Base64 or Quoted-Printable, there are no such worries because every character in the MIME is us-ascii.