Hi Steven,
To be fair ... that's completely permitted according to the spec!
That doesn't make it a good idea. :-)
Well, I think it is a good idea and that's probably why it was
permitted. I don't recall precisely, and don't have time to check, but
I think the RFC even recommends it. This is because what can be plain
ASCII stays plain ASCII and you just encode the odd bit which can't.
This makes it easier for humans reading the still-encoding header field.
The goal is, and has always been, to save the message in a format that
can be searched easily at a later date.
I'm rusty, but my recollection is things like ‘forw -mime’ and dist(1)
assume ~/mail/inbox/42 is in a valid format to ship and don't do any
checks or conversions. mhfixmsg(1) repeatedly mentions RFC violations
in some of its possible outputs.
So having searched and found it, don't send it on. :-)
--
Cheers, Ralph.