One of the strongest reasons to use MIME encoding, even for plain text
messages is MIME's ability to support multiple languages and character
sets. While I am new to PGP, I do not believe that multi-lingual
support is part of PGP 2.6.X. Plain text email which makes up most
domestic US email is not MIME encoded and uses the defined default
USASCII character set and the English language. This probably is not
a valid assumption for the Internet as a whole.
Multilingual support is an IESG requirement for all IETF protocols
going forward. At a minimum this requires identification of the
selected character set, and in the mail context, a way to encooding
these 8 or 16 bit characters into a 7 bit transfer format such as
Quoted Printable.
Greg V.
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Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 16:19:49 +0000
From: Ian Brown <I(_dot_)Brown(_at_)cs(_dot_)ucl(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk>
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To: Thomas Roessler <roessler(_at_)guug(_dot_)de>
CC: IETF OpenPGP <ietf-open-pgp(_at_)imc(_dot_)org>
Subject: Re: The Case Against MIME
References: <199711191514(_dot_)KAA04597(_at_)users(_dot_)invweb(_dot_)net>
<34730B77(_dot_)61958AD9(_at_)cs(_dot_)ucl(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk>
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