Re: [ietf-smtp] Quoted-Printable-8bit

[Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 08:39:03PM -0400, John R Levine wrote:

> I couple of years ago I did some surveys of MTAs for the UASG.  Of 56,901 
> MTAs I survyed, 56,262 advertised 8BITMIME.  The only identifiable MTA not 
> offering it was an obscure Windows MTA called Mailenable.
> 
> There were a few Postfix and Exim servers not advertising it (165 out of 
> 28,000 for Exim, 15 out of 14,739 for Postfix) which I assume were 
> configuration errors.
> 
> It would be resonable to make 8BITMIME a MUST now.  Ever since the last 
> PDP-10 left the net about 30 years ago, every machine on the Internet uses 
> 8 bit bytes which makes 8BITMIME close to free to implement.

Not much point, unless one also at the same time deprecates 7bit
downgrade when the peer does not advertise 8BITMIME.  Otherwise, the
behaviour when it is a MUST is indistinguishable from the status quo.

Are you proposing that too?  I believe most user-friendly MUAs send
quoted-printable, so the issue is typically moot.  Though "mutt",
which I am using for this message, does send unencoded UTF-8 as an
8bit body (I have send_charset="us-ascii:utf-8:iso-8859-1").

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