Masatka Ohta writes:
So, the current MIME specification for non-Mime mail that says:
Default RFC 822 messages are typed by this protocol as plain
text in the US-ASCII character set, which can be explicitly
specified as "Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii".
should be removed, because, for you, it is specification on non-MIME
mails and, for me, it is obstacle to the Internationalized Internet.
I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding. That paragraph
simply RESTATES, in terms of the MIME content-type, the definition that
was already made in RFC 822. RFC 822 makes it very clear that messages
are 7-bit ASCII. All that this paragraph does is to explain how that
pre-existent reality is expressed in MIME terms.
The fact that various local communities sent things other than ASCII
around in pre-MIME mail is important, but not relevant to the
standardization issue: Those uses were clearly out of spec with regard
to RFC 822, and were an important reason why MIME was designed in the
first place! -- Nathaniel