[mel-base-devel] Some remarks

[Frédéric Jolliton]

Hi,

[..]
> The standard encoding for internet-mail messages is indeed not
> octets but 7bit ASCII; you're supposed to use base64 or
> quoted-printable encoding to transfer 8bit contents.

I agree. But however, in 2006, I don't think you can find a 7bit-only
server anymore :) I'm working mostly with sendmail and cyrus imapd,
and both support 8bits (at least for the body, while for the header it
is either undefined behavior, mangled or rejected in such cases.) The
8BITMIME extension for SMTP seems universal.

By curiosity, I made some stats from my imap server: 28998 mails out
of 244247 contains 8bit characters (11.8%.) [Which prove nothing, just
that it is usual to have to process 8bit mail.]

-- 
Frédéric Jolliton