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Re: [ietf-smtp] Quoted-Printable-8bit

2021-03-29 20:00:48
It appears that Sam Varshavchik  <mrsam(_at_)courier-mta(_dot_)com> said:
So, what is the answer to the same question, for BINARYMIME? This is mostly  
conjecture, but I'd say that email implementations tend to fall into two  
broad categories.

CHUNKING and BINARYMIME were in RFC 1830.

RFC 2045 says:

   Mail transport for unencoded 8bit data is defined in RFC 1652.  As of
   the initial publication of this document, there are no standardized
   Internet mail transports for which it is legitimate to include
   unencoded binary data in mail bodies.  Thus there are no
   circumstances in which the "binary" Content-Transfer-Encoding is
   actually valid in Internet mail. ...

I get the impression that BINARYMIME was a placeholder they threw in
with the hope that some other kind of framing would come along. The
advantage of BDAT over DATA for 8BITMIME is pretty modest, and can
even be negative for the implementations that send small 8K BDAT
chunks.

The fact that nothing like quoted-unprintable has ever gotten any traction
tells me that even the overhead of base64 vs 8BITMIME isn't something people
care about.

R's,
John

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