< For many years, we are using localized(Japanese) versions of MUA, and they
< assume plain text messages are in the ISO-2022-JP encoding. If we assume
< plain text messages are in US-ASCII, we lose the inter- operability with
< many existing MUA. We have many colleages that know NOTHING about the
< MIME standard, and we can't force all of them to give up their MUAs. They
< are posting many messages for us WITHOUT Content-Type: or even WITHOUT
< MIME-Version:, NOW!
Then these MUA's have been violating RFC 822 for years. Mr. Ohta would have
us believe otherwise, but his claims have been disproven many times.
< We found nothing useful with charset. For example, we often handle
< messages of plain text without help of MUA. Of course our tools like
< less, grep, or Mule know nothing about MIME specification. How do you tell
< them the MIME standard?
But your MUA's do have help: they have the help of an assumption that the
plain text messages they receive are actually iso-2022-jp and not us-ascii.
< Or, if the charset is required, how do we choose value for charset? If we
< found US-ASCII characters in the message, we will also find ISO-8859-1,
< JIS X0208, or many other characters from many other standard character
< sets.
The MUA which creates the message is the one which generates the charset
value. If you're generating iso-2022-jp, then just mark the message as using
iso-2022-jp. It's that simple.
< Or, with or without the other information like MIME charset, our
< internationalized (or localized) MUAs or the other tools have to scan all
< of the received text when we want to find characters that can not be
< handled correctly with the local system.
If the message-creating MUA marks the message, and not the receiving MUA or
the gateway, then that isn't a problem.
< I'm designing a new MUA with internationalized features. If the draft
< will become Internet standard, I have to ignore the standard to keep
< interoperability with existing tools...
No, you just have to mark your messages as using iso-2022-jp using the MIME
charset specification. It's that simple.
Tony Hansen
hansen(_at_)pegasus(_dot_)att(_dot_)com,
tony(_at_)attmail(_dot_)com
att!pegasus!hansen, attmail!tony