ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Problems with RFC 2047

2003-03-09 12:14:36

A message I sent recently contained the following subject:

Subject: Tid fär nästa möte med CMC-forskargruppen

It was sent as follows:

Subject: Tid =?iso-8859-1?Q?f=E4r?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?_?=
 =?iso-8859-1?Q?n=E4sta?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?_?=
 =?iso-8859-1?Q?m=F6te?= med CMC-forskargruppen

And when I received the same message, the subject looked 
like follows:

Subject: Tid fär 
 nästa 
 möte med CMC-forskargruppen

The cause of the problems seems to be that RFC2047 makes 
the subject much longer, and the sending mailer is of the 
opinion that no header line should be longer than 78 
characters, and thus splits the subject on multiple lines.
And the sending mailer had to encode each line with its
own =?iso-8859-1?Q?, making the problem worse.

This, then, will be a problem with any encoding scheme 
which increases the number of bytes in a header. And also 
UTF-8 can increase the number of bytes, and thus cause the 
same problem.

The problem would have been solved if RFC 2047 included a 
facility to split a header into multiple lines, which are 
not to be received as multiple lines, like the "=" at the 
end of a line in Quoted-Printabe.
-- 
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>