RFC 1652 (rfc1652) - Page 1 of 6

SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport

Network Working Group                               J. Klensin, WG Chair
Request for Comments: 1652                                           MCI
Obsoletes: 1426                                         N. Freed, Editor
Category: Standards Track                                       Innosoft
                                                                 M. Rose
                                            Dover Beach Consulting, Inc.
                                                            E. Stefferud
                                     Network Management Associates, Inc.
                                                              D. Crocker
                                                  Silicon Graphics, Inc.
                                                               July 1994


             SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   This memo defines an extension to the SMTP service whereby an SMTP
   content body consisting of text containing octets outside of the US-
   ASCII octet range (hex 00-7F) may be relayed using SMTP.

1.  Introduction

   Although SMTP is widely and robustly deployed, various extensions
   have been requested by parts of the Internet community. In
   particular, a significant portion of the Internet community wishes to
   exchange messages in which the content body consists of a MIME
   message [3] containing arbitrary octet-aligned material. This memo
   uses the mechanism described in [5] to define an extension to the
   SMTP service whereby such contents may be exchanged. Note that this
   extension does NOT eliminate the possibility of an SMTP server
   limiting line length; servers are free to implement this extension
   but nevertheless set a line length limit no lower than 1000 octets.
   Given that this restriction still applies, this extension does NOT
   provide a means for transferring unencoded binary via SMTP.








Klensin, Freed, Rose, Stefferud & Crocker