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

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Sunday, July 18, 2021 00:18 -0400 Viktor Dukhovni
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 10:42:41PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>> > Our MTA defaults to this as well. But it's trivial to switch
>> > off, and I have no way of knowing how many sites do so.
>> 
>> Completely out of curiosity, as the amount of traffic that
>> does not use Latin script increases (IMO, quoted-printable is
>> far less useful when most of the characters are outside the
>> ASCII repertoire), do either of you do the fairly minimal
>> analysis needed to decide when Base64 would be more compact
>> and no less useful?
> 
> No, because message sizes are rarely dominated by the text
> parts.  The large attachments that dominate message sizes are
> typically already Base64 encoded.  Just using quoted-printable
> is not a problem for the 8bit text, even when not optimal.

Makes sense, especially if there are non-text body parts.  And
John Levine's observation that 8BITMIME appears to be
universally supported at this stage makes the whole issue moot
although, perhaps just out of habit, I continue to worry about
people who have much worse Internet connections than those
participating in this discussion..

tnanks,
   john