Now, consider a scenario where a mail client (supporting 8bit) sends
an email with a binary-converted-to-8bit attachment to my MTA, A. My MTA
connects to non-8bit remote MTA, B. Now, my MTA converts attachment from
8bit to base64, and sends it.
Given this, when any mail client connects to MTA B, it downloads the
attachment and applies base64 conversion. Now, will that client be able to
retrieve original binary attachment, OR it will get 8bit attachment ?
nothing should ever be converting from binary to 8bit. the only reason
to convert from binary to anything is when sending to a 7-bit-only MTA;
and then you have to use base64 or q-p. one reason you don't convert to
8bit (or for that matter 7bit) is that neither 8bit nor 7bit can represent
all octet values. 8bit and 7bit were not really intended as encodings,
they were intended as a way to mark unencoded text. these days everyone
supports MIME so there's not as much need to transmit unencoded text.
even assuming there were a binary-to-8bit converter, it would only make
sense for text objects that used short lines and CRLF line endings.
Also, could you please point out some mail clients dealing 8bit. I
could not find 8bit CTE configuration setting in outlook. It has just base64
and QP options.
I don't know of any. I don't think 8bit is used very often.
Keith