8 bit vs 7 bit email issue

[killerdd]

Hello Everyone,

I'm hoping someone can help me with an issue that my companies application team has ran into. I'm a UNIX SA but my knowledge on Sendmail is limited. Currently we are running on Solaris 7 with sendmail 8.10.2.

The application team determined that when the messages length is <= 991 charactors , it is sent as 7-bit and if it is over 999 , it is sent as 8-bit. The application team is using javax.mail.internet for sending out the emails.

Why is the mail being sent out 7-bit if it is <=991? Is there a way to force sendmail to send these specific messages as 8-bit?

From ISM Thu Mar 3 14:09:21 2005
Received: from SYSTEM (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by SYSTEM.ocs.foobar.com (8.10.2+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id j23E9Ks05326
for <OSTRX>; Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:09:20 GMT
Message-ID: <12406349.1109858960589.JavaMail.cgoos@SYSTEM>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:09:20 +0000 (GMT+00:00)
From: ISM
To: OSTRX
Subject: MUP FWD:SCH CDMP:foobar MAWB:257-70225945 ROUTE:KLUSIN TX:03 MAR 2005 1409 (UTC)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Mailer: sendEmail
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by SYSTEM.ocs.foobar.com id j23E9Ks05326
Content-Length: 1118

From ISM Thu Mar 3 14:09:21 2005
Received: from hsu100 (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by SYSTEM.ocs.foobar.com (8.10.2+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id j23E9Ks05331
for <OSTRX>; Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:09:20 GMT
Message-ID: <8347285.1109858960971.JavaMail.cgoos@SYSTEM>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:09:20 +0000 (GMT+00:00)
From: ISM
To: OSTRX
Subject: MUP FWD:SCH CDMP:UNISYS MAWB:257-70042475 ROUTE:INNATH TX:03 MAR 2005 1409 (UTC)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: sendEmail
Content-Length: 958