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Subject: Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs
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Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:

> I know Emacs is able to use utf-8 encoding so Gnus is.
>
> My question is more a question of compliance with other MUAs.
> Would you recommend your users to use utf-8 as a default encoding
> system ?

No, because there's no reason to use UTF-8 if a more widely supported
charset is sufficient.

To use UTF-8 by default would also be against RFC 2046:

,----[ RFC 2046, Section 4.1.2. ]
|
|    In general, composition software should always use the "lowest common
|    denominator" character set possible.  For example, if a body contains
|    only US-ASCII characters, it SHOULD be marked as being in the US-
|    ASCII character set, not ISO-8859-1, which, like all the ISO-8859
|    family of character sets, is a superset of US-ASCII.  More generally,
|    if a widely-used character set is a subset of another character set,
|    and a body contains only characters in the widely-used subset, it
|    should be labelled as being in that subset.  This will increase the
|    chances that the recipient will be able to view the resulting entity
|    correctly.
`----

But if the message contains characters (or combination of characters)
where a _single_ iso-8859-x charset can't be used, then by all means
use UTF-8.  This is far better than sending a multipart message (which
Gnus does if UTF-8 isn't available).