On Tue, 11 Feb 92 09:50:09 EST you said:
I thought I had understood from the discussion in Santa Fe that an
(unescaped) end-of-line in quoted printable was always to be interpreted
as 0D hex, 0A hex, regardless of the local convention for representing
ends-of-lines in text files. I don't see this spelled out quite so
clearly in the current MIME draft.
Quoted-printable has strictly no technical raison d'etre. It has been
introduced to allow encoded text to be somewhat visible. If only the
presence of x'0D0A' in the text can produce a (hard) line break in the
encoding, quoted-printable produced by machines using anything else
internally to delimit lines will not contain any hard line-breaks.
Makes the encoding rather difficult to read. But there is more :
the line structure of the text will be lost when decoded on a machine
using another local convention. Or am I goofing once again ?
However, it wouldn't hurt to restrict the types of conversion that can
be done by a relaying MTA. Such conversions should always be to a
"safer" format. So, ordering the content-transfer-encodings as follows:
BINARY
8BIT QUOTED-PRINTABLE BASE64
7BIT
you can only convert to something further to the right.
Does not help at all. Suppose, in my example, that host A sends
quoted-printable. The encoding would then be :
ABBP=0D
8=0Fj6z=e0*O<
If the gateway decodes and reincodes in base64, the final result will be :
41 42 42 50 0D 0D 0A 38 0F 6A 36 7A E0 2A 4F 3C
/AF