Excerpts from ext.ietf-822: 14-Nov-91 Re: Trivial checksums for B..
Nathaniel Borenstein(_at_)thu (860)
As for quoted-printable, I guess I'm just skeptical that a checksum is
necessary. If it isn't textual data, you probably won't use q-p. If it
is textual data, a checksum is highly problematic across, e.g.,
ascii-ebcdic gateways. So I just don't see it as being worth the effort.
A checksum in quoted-printable would really be handy for some of our
formats. In particular, we tend to send fairly long text messages
(charset=X-XCS, I guess), with from 10 to a few thousand non-text octets
at the end, all of which are fairly critical if any of the markup is to
succeed.
As a few people have pointed out, a gateway such as you mention would
have to understand character codes on both sides, anyway. It would have
to translate the message, and re-compute the checksum.
Bill