I see that Ohta-san has started a campaign to get more people
to write to the list about the ISO 2022 issue.
Actually, I am thinking that he is a bit right (as usual; that is
why it is hard to be only angry at his "interesting" means of
expressing himself).
What I would suggest as replacement for the sentence he hates
would be the following:
In the absence of a MIME-Version: field, the recipient may
choose to believe anything about the content of the message,
but the sender cannot assume that anything outside the
US-ASCII character set will be understood by MIME capable readers.
This would seem to be less inconsistent with current practice than
the current text.
(Note that I have *not* said anything about the occurence of ESC in
the headers, and neither does the RFC 1521 revision. That is a whole
different kettle of fish!)
Harald T. Alvestrand