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

2021-03-30 21:22:39


--On Tuesday, March 30, 2021 22:09 -0400 Viktor Dukhovni
<ietf-dane(_at_)dukhovni(_dot_)org> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 08:39:03PM -0400, John R Levine wrote:

I couple of years ago I did some surveys of MTAs for the
UASG.  Of 56,901  MTAs I survyed, 56,262 advertised 8BITMIME.
The only identifiable MTA not  offering it was an obscure
Windows MTA called Mailenable.

There were a few Postfix and Exim servers not advertising it
(165 out of  28,000 for Exim, 15 out of 14,739 for Postfix)
which I assume were  configuration errors.

It would be resonable to make 8BITMIME a MUST now.  Ever
since the last  PDP-10 left the net about 30 years ago, every
machine on the Internet uses  8 bit bytes which makes
8BITMIME close to free to implement.

Not much point, unless one also at the same time deprecates
7bit downgrade when the peer does not advertise 8BITMIME.
Otherwise, the behaviour when it is a MUST is
indistinguishable from the status quo.

Are you proposing that too?  I believe most user-friendly MUAs
send quoted-printable, so the issue is typically moot.  Though
"mutt", which I am using for this message, does send unencoded
UTF-8 as an 8bit body (I have
send_charset="us-ascii:utf-8:iso-8859-1").

Victor, 
Not speaking for John, but the point I was trying to make is
that, if anyone is offering support for non-ASCII addresses
and/or header fields, 8BITMIME (and advertising it) is already a
MUST.  And, if anyone is not offering support for non-ASCII
addresses and header fields and is trying to appeal to, or
interact with, a diverse international audience, it is probably
time to get with the program... or expect to be called upon to
explain why not (if not already, then soon).

   john

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