Re: 8Bit Header encoding with Gnus: qp - rfc2047

["Bjørn Mork" <bmork@dod.no>]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> Ulrich Schwarz <uschwarz@gmx.net> writes:
> 
> > Thus, Gnus should use RFC2047 header encoding for news, too.
> 
> Unencoded 8-bit headers are prefered in the dk.* hierarchy, because
> that is supported by most news agents in use.  I suspect the situation
> is the same in the no.* hierarchy.

Correct. I believe the same goes for relcom and a few other
hierarchies. The header charset must of course also be specified.

I must say that I am surprised to hear about flaming based on 8bit
chars in Usenet headers. I've posted hundreds of articles in comp,
rec, alt, news and a few other hierarchies, and never been flamed
(well, at least not for the header encoding :-). All of the articles
have had at least one header with 8bit chars (because of my name...)
and a working mail address.

The reason is of course that 8bit headers don't cause any problems for
anybody. The chars may not always look like they were supposed to,
but that's not important (I don't care whether people call me Bjørn,
Bjxrn, Bj|rn, Bjorn, or Bj¤rn). What's important is that rfc2047
really fucks up readers that don't understand it, and makes the text
unreadable. I do not like being called =?iso-8859-1?q?Bj=F8rn?=. You
will really need your flameproof suit if you post something like that
in no.*

Therefore 8bit for news and rfc2047 for mail (where you have more
control over the client software in the other end) is a reasonable
default. But it should be possible to change it based on hierarchy,
and IIRC it is. I just don't remember how. Anybody?


Bjørn