Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>
> Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 07:33:20 -0500
> Reply-To: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Thus the Emacs format is backwards compatible but older netrc consumers
> can't necessarily read our tokens, so I think it's OK that we go further
> and explicitly allow Unicode characters through UTF-8.  Would it make
> sense, then, to explicitly use utf-8 or auto-guess for the encoding
> instead of raw-text?

Only if either (a) we encode the responses we send to the SMTP server
during handshake, or (b) SMTP servers support UTF-8 encoding in the
strings they expect to receive.

Lars said "encoding is local", which suggest that neither of the above
is true.  raw-text leaves the byte stream unchanged, and only converts
the EOL, so a netrc file encoded in some locale-specific way has a
better chance with SMTP servers from the same locale.

IOW, to answer your question, someone who knows more than I do about
communications with SMTP servers should tell us how, if at all,
non-ASCII characters are supposed to be handled when communicating
with the server.