Re: [Emailcore] encodings, was Ticket #14: G.7.8. Review different size limits

[Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>]

John Levine wrote in
 <[e-mail]>:
 |It appears that Steffen Nurpmeso  <[e-mail]> said:
 |>Jeremy Harris wrote in
 |> <[e-mail]>:
 |>|On 17/07/2021 17:16, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |>|> Your MUA created the according MIME headers, but whether it used
 |>|> the 8BITMIME SMTP extension when passing this over to a MTA, that
 |>|> is here the question.
 |>|
 |>|See https://cr.yp.to/smtp/8bitmime.html for one opinion, written quite
 |>|a long time ago.  Exim has been following that for the last nine years.
 |>
 |>I have to say i never quite understood the "an email message must
 |>be human readable text" approach.
 |
 |djb wrote that in 1998 when MUAs that support MIME were a lot less \
 |ubiquitous
 |than they are now, and I don't know anyone who objects to base64 encoding
 |of PDFs and JPEGs.  But 7bit MTAs were gone in 1998 and they're even more
 |gone now so there is no point in encoding anything that is an 8 bit \
 |extended
 |ASCII like UTF-8 or ISO-8859-x.

Well the paper may have inspired people to try out and use pure
8-bit paths for good twenty years ago.
..and of course except message generators have to because of the
constraints (length limits, ^From_, invalid bytes) which do exist.
And attachments / signatures and massive header pollution also
make a raw internet message unpleasant to look at.  So but for
debugging maybe any desire or even praising of message/global
seemed a bit artificial to me.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)