ietf-822
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Re: UTF-7 sucks

1998-10-30 13:46:34
At 1998-10-30 11:47, Chris Newman wrote:

UTF-7 has the following problems:

* far worse backwards compatibility than quoted-printable.  Some people
hate MIME due to what they consider "quoted-unreadable".  If you use
UTF-7, there will be lots of people who will start hating Unicode as a
result.

* The uptake of the 8BITMIME SMTP extension has been excellent.  This
means that unencoded UTF-8 with CTE 8-bit is usually possible.  UTF-8
doesn't have double-encoding or searching problems.

OK. So how's this:

1. Pick a charset, in this order: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, some other common 
charset, UTF-8.

2. Use 7bit CTE if you can. Otherwise, use 8bit CTE.

3. Send the message. If the recipient complains that SMTP mangled your 
8bit text, resend using quoted-printable CTE.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA


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