Re: posting-charset abolition

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, yamaoka@jpl.org wrote:
> You are right.  Putting CTE:8 to 7-bit articles is absolutely
> harmless.  However, it is closely reminded of vicious MUAs
> rampant all over the world.  Possibly they became better than
> ancient times, though.  (In old days, Japanese mails were in a
> wretched condition.)  Although this is no more than a personal
> matter of taste, it is worthwhile to delete an excessive header,
> isn't it?
> 
> rfc1521.txt:
>   ..."Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT" is assumed if the
>   Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is not present.
> 
> So, I want to do that if it is not a burden on Gnus.

I think the simplest programmatic solution is to scan the message
buffer right before sending, when it's already encoded, and add the
CTE: 8bit header if any 8-bit characters are detected.  But I still
think this is unnecessary work for other than aesthetic reasons, as
very few MTAs today do 7bit CTE, and setting the header to 8bit is
harmless to 7bit data.

I don't understand the statement about "vicious MUAs rampant."

-- 
Ted Zlatanov