On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Ian Bell wrote:
From draft-gellens-format-01.txt
If Quoted-Printable is used, it SHOULD NOT be used to protect the
trailing space.
.
.
the safer course is to not protect the trailing spaces unless the
body part is cryptographically signed.
This overrides RFC2045 (where trailing spaces MUST be protected or
deleted when generating qp, and must be deleted when removing qp).
I had forgotten the rule in RFC 2045 about deleting trailing spaces when
decoding qp. Given that rule, we need to remove the sentence about not
using quoted-printable to protect the trailing space. Thanks for catching
this.
The intent of Format=Flowed is to allow user agents to generate
flowed text which is non-obnoxious when viewed as pure Text/Plain;
use of Quoted-Printable hinders this and may cause Format=Flowed to
be rejected by end users.
QP does not hinder the stated intent when sent to MIME-capable MUAs, it
is only when QP is sent to non-MIME recipients that problems arise.
True.
Perhaps the wording should be aimed at dissuading MUAs from using qp
when the recipients' MUAs are not known to support MIME. This would be a
good thing in itself, but almost certainly a lost cause :-(
The rules I'd go for are:
* if the text is 7-bit use CTE 7bit instead of QP. Don't worry about
"From " or trailing whitespace or similar things.
* if a client supports 8-bit text, it should use ESMTP 8BITMIME and CTE
8bit in preference to QP.
- Chris