On 08/07/2017 01:54 PM, David W Noon wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Aug 2017 13:08:20 -0500, Elardus Engelbrecht
> ([email protected]) wrote about "Re: Curse you, L-Soft!"
> (in <6156763411207138.wa.elardus.engelbrechtsita.co...@listserv.ua.edu>):
>
>> Paul Gilmartin wrote:
>>
>>> I can neither submit an SR to L-Soft nor rant on the L-Soft mailing list
>>> because I'm not a registered L-Soft customer.
>> I feel your pain. I also wanted to moan and b*tch about base 64 encoding
>> amongst other things, but ...
> Sometimes Base64 or other binary-safe encoding is required by RFC.
E.g, base64 can be required for the message body when message headers
say it is encoded with "charset=UTF-8" or some other 8-bit encoding and
it gets sent to a recipient mail server that responds it is unable to
support 8bitMIME. For that to happen implies some system in the chain
of servers handling the email is running software that is over a decade
old, or for some reason has deliberately been configured to disable
8bitMIME support. Then again maybe it's really a header of
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" (some characters contain non-zero 8th
bit) that triggers the problem rather than just charset UTF-8, which
might explain the rareness of the problem despite common usage of UTF-8
these days.
It is highly unlikely the end user "submitted" the email using a base64
encoding of the message text, but rather that it was just submitted with
UTF-8 and some server in the path taken by the email to the ibm-main
list forced the usage of base64 to constrain the message to 7-bit
characters.
My email client (Thunderbird under Fedora Linux) sends charset UTF-8 by
default, but the headers also contain "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit",
unless I actually include some UTF-8 characters that require a non-zero
8th bit, in which case it sends "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit". I
know the messages I send to another of my email accounts with UTF-8 and
Transfer-Encoding 8bit do not get transformed to base64, nor do my
normal posts to IBM-main with charset UTF-8 and Transfer-Encoding 7bit.
As an experiment, I will try adding some "unusual" characters (like
degree ° and check__✔) to force Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit and see
what the list does to this message.__
Joel C. Ewing
...
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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