Do you think you can send 8-bit characters to me? You can't! By
using the ESMTP extension you can get that information and "downgrade"
your mail.
The point is that people, reportedly, do NOT accept automatic
QP downgrading of MIME and, instead, downgrade the original
text by themselves only to use 7bit.
That is, QP is a failure.
Though I can't evaluate how serious the failure is, it is not
surprising to me if people in a small(?) community continues to
just-send-8bit forever.
When 8th bit truncated messages are merely just equally unreadable
as QP-downgraded messages, why not try to send as is without
downgrading?
That is, hypothetical virtue of backward compatibility of MIME is
denied by the practice.
What are you talking about? In Kelds environment they did choose
MNEMONICS together with MIME instead of using QP to be able to
more easy handle the process when migrating from 822-only mail
to MIME. That a group of people did choose MNEMONICS does NOT
imply that they did not choose MIME.
What are you talking about? What MIME capability, do you think,
MNEMONICS needs?
Please read what I did write. I didn't write anything about MIME
in the sentence about the MNEMONIC stuff.
So, as QP is not preffered, MIME, which should have been related,
is made unrelated, which I call failure.
What I was arguing about was that noone in daily life should
just-send-8 without first using some ESMTP extension.
In 821-ext context, you are right.
But, in 822-ext context where your choice is between just-send-8bit
and QP-downgrade, the answer in the real world seems to be
different.
Masataka Ohta