D. J. Bernstein wrote: >It is not reasonable to demand that this >7-bit garbage be allowed to remain on the network forever, at the >expense of all future implementors and users. OK, you're obviously in a better position than I am to appreciate the cost to implementors. But users? Suppose you could streamline qmail by dropping support for talking to 7-bit servers. How do you convince a postmaster to install it? The bandwidth cost of having to use 7-bit encoding is real, but small; the cost of losing connectivity to sites is potentially high. Worse, it's almost impossible to put an upper bound on the cost of lost connectivity. For a company, it could mean losing messages (and sales) from important customers; businesses have failed over such things. For commercial implementors, it's a no-brainer: dropping 7-bit support will lose customers, so don't do it. For open-source implementors such as yourself, naturally, things are less clear-cut. /==============================================================\ |John Stracke |Principal Engineer | |jstracke@incentivesystems.com |Incentive Systems, Inc. | |http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own. | |==============================================================| |"This [OLE] isn't an API, this is a shaggy dog story in C!" --| |Unknown | \==============================================================/