Just for fun, I counted the number of "content-transfer-encodings"
used in my mailbox:
dale:~/ietf/headers> find ~/Mail -type f -print | xargs grep -hi
^content-transfer-encoding | hdrvalues
19
23 base64
334 8bit
1 base64; compression="gzip"
7 16bit
248 7bit
7 binary
337 quoted-printable
The number of files was 6502; 976 C-T-Es were found.
("hdrvalues" is a short PERL script for counting values after the :)
It seems clear that people find the "c-t-e: 8bit" an useful tag somehow!
NOTE: My system does *not* support ESMTP/8BITMIME, so in a "perfect world",
these would not have arrived as C-T-E 8bit. The world is *not* perfect....
Harald T. Alvestrand
(For even more useless information, here is the set of most common
content-types; those with less than 10 occurences are deleted)
10 application/pem-signature
10 message/delivery-status
10 multipart/report
10 multipart/signed
10 text/enriched
12 text/plain;charset="ns_4551-1"
13 text/plain;charset=us-ascii;x-mapiextension=".txt"
15 application/postscript
22
119 message/rfc822
149 multipart/alternative
150 text/plain;charset="iso-8859-1"
190 text
300 message/external-body;
325 text/plain
419 text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
424 multipart/mixed
504 text/plain;charset="us-ascii"
641 text/plain;charset=us-ascii
This is 2986 out of the 6502, uncommon types and non-MIME types not included.
MIME is winning!)