[rt-users] [netaktiv.com #100] RT email and the ISO-8859-1 characters

[Smylers]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 05:57:13PM +0900,
>  Ben Gertzfield <che at debian.org> wrote
>  a message of 44 lines which said:
>
> > If you do not send your 8-bit email encoded either in Quoted-Printable
> > or Base64, then you're violating RFC 2822 and will run into trouble
> > with email gateways:
>
> Almost all the SMTP servers are now 8-bits clean. Nobody still runs
> sendmail 5 :-)

Quite possibly, but the purpose of standards is for people to follow
them!  If individual's make their own decisions, that defeats the reason
for having standards.  It's simply wrong to send out mail with
top-bit-set characters.

> > What makes you say that "nobody does it"?
>
> On a typical french-speaking mailing list:
>
> aragon:~/Mail/debian % grep -i 'content-transfer-encoding: *quoted-printable' french |wc -l
>     436
> aragon:~/Mail/debian % grep -i 'content-transfer-encoding: *8bit' french |wc -l
>    1276

You can't prove correctness by counting votes!  Anyway, by your numbers
a third as many people are using QP as 8-bit.  For what it's worth,
here are my numbers:

  $ find ~/mail -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -ih '^Content-Transfer-Encoding:' | sort -f | uniq -ic | sort -nr
     1228 Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
      485 Content-transfer-encoding: base64
      449 Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
      280 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit
        5 Content-Transfer-Encoding:  7bit
        2 Content-Transfer-Encoding: x-uuencode
        2 Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
        2 Content-Transfer-Encoding:7bit

I'm in the UK, so many mails are fine in Ascii, but need Latin1 for
things like pound signs or foreign-derived words.  It looks like I've
got over three times as many mails base 64 or QP encoded as 8-bit.  So I
don't think you can generalize about Latin1 countries anyway.

Smylers
-- 
GBdirect
http://www.gbdirect.co.uk/