Re: [Nmh-workers] UTF=8 in message bodies

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On 2012-12-05, at 12:48 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:

> Interoperability with 7-bit mailers?  Really?  REALLY?

Yes, really.  There is, and always will be, a lot of cruft out there that 
simply cannot be upgraded. Email is one of the few protocols that has survived 
the ravages of time. RFC 82[12] and their follow-on  documents have 
deliberately taken a very conservative stance about backwards compatibility, 
and for a very good reason: *822 email remains the single common denominator of 
interoperable messaging there is on the internet.  When MIME came along, Ned 
and crew went to great pains to ensure that everything they layered on top of 
82[12] would not require any modifications to already deployed systems.  While 
that made for some ugly looking goo (encoded headers), it *didn't* *break* 
*anything*.

And compared to the current monstrosities that are email clients these days, 
anyone who complains about 7bit being too much work to support in something 
like MH needs to take up a different hobby :-)

--lyndon