Well, I'm a little leery about this one, primarily because I've yet to
see any evidence of 8-bit enclaves (presumably in Europe) converting
from "8bit" to some other content-transfer-encoding when mail leaves
their enclave. (I realize that MIME is less than a year old, and it may
well start happening soon.) Until such gateways are built, I fear that
quoted-binary will only make matters worse, by encouraging mail to be
sent around in a form that is even less meaningful when it
"unexpectedly" leaves the enclave.
But consider this: If you have control of an enclave, you can make sure
that data with a transfer-encoding of "quoted-binary" never leaves it,
right? So you can define your own local c-t-e ("x-quoted-binary"?) and
make sure your gateway never lets such data out. One might even claim
that in such a case standardization is unnecessary, but I wouldn't go
that far. What I would suggest is that if someone gets this working in
a gateway, then an RFC documenting and standardizing the "quoted-binary"
usage would be a trivial amount of followup effort. I'd just like to
see at least one gateway come first! -- NB