file corruption and 7 bit

[Claude_Setzer at fcsmtp.mum.edu]

Dear Dominik,

you said....
>About the 7-bit problem; the present incarnation of the 
>Internet protocol is inherently a 7-bit data transport 
>system.  So even if you use an email
>program that says it can give and take 8-bit
> mail (mine can, for instance), it only works
 >between certain similarly-enabled hosts.............

Thank you for your nice and very informative note. I feel like we are finally
getting down to finding some solutions, with your post and several others in
the last few days.


I am very sorry that I personally do not have a large amount of time to devote
to this, but something I think would be very useful would be to compile a
detailed list of compatible and non-compatible means of transferring 8 bit
character/glyph sets over INTERNET.
This could, perhaps be hosted by the Indology Web site. Based on this I think
we might be able to arrange for all or most of the members of  Indology to
start using this more complete system. 

I have absolutely no argument with anything you said, but others seem to think
that it is possible to transfer 8 bit character sets even when a 7 bit
encoding scheme is used. I have found that Microsoft's (free) INTERNET mail
software has several methods of encoding 8 bit character sets. My experiments
seem to favor the UUencode method rather than the MIME for transfer of high
characters. (This is the label Microsoft gives it. Their encoding labeled MIME
seems to work less easily. Uuencode gives actual high characters, base 64
gives gibberish, Quoted gives an = sign followed by the character number on my
email receiver (the one that eliminates the last bit of character map when
sending). But perhaps some simple software would reinterpret the = and
character to give the proper glyph.)

Thanks for your input!!

Sincerely ,

Claude Setzer


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