The non-US non-MIME senders DO assume that something outside the
US-ASCII character set will be understood by MIME capable readers of the
recipient.
That's how non-US implementors have implemented MIME.
This is undoubtedly true.
The only problem is, they don't all make the same assumption as to
what character set will be used.
which is the problem to be addressed by ISO-2022-INT-*, I believe.
I don't want MIME to require a certain interpretation for non-MIME
messages. But I don't see why the MIME spec can't point this out,
to encourage implementors to label charsets of outgoing mail.
As outgoing MIME mails are already labelled (maybe with MIME default
of US-ASCII), MIME implementors do not have to be encouraged to do so.
And, as observed recently, MIME sepcification have made some
Sewdish misunderstand that MIME is panacea, when they only need
8BITMIME, it might even better to add some phrase explicitely
saying that MIME does not solve real encoding issues like:
"charset" mechanism of MIME is of limited usefulness
to distinguish multiple locatlizations only. Other
approaches, outside of MIME, must be sought for the
Internationalization.
But I'm not pushing the phrase so hard.
Masataka Ohta