Re: smtpmail support of unicode passwords

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > My reading if the relevant RFCs is that UTF-8 must be used, but I'm no
 > expert in this area.

By relevant RFCs I assume you mean RFC 4616 (aka SASL "PLAIN")?

Indeed, the receiving server is going to expect that the string is
valid UTF-8.  That doesn't necessarily mean that Emacs has the string
as characters in internal encoding, appropriate to be encoded via the
utf-8 coding system before being sent on the wire.  It might also have
it as bytes read from a file using the binary codec (the main use case
I'm worried about), or the user may have learned to type it that way,
etc.

Of course if you know you have a string decoded using binary, you can
translate it using utf-8 before sending it back through utf-8 and then
onto the wire.

I guess it's actually quite likely that the binary file contains
Latin-N or some form of Cyrillic, etc, so if needed the decode-encode
cycle is probably the way to go.  So you may as well hard-code utf-8
here after all.