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Subject: Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs
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Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:

> Well, I think, if you want to maximize the chance that your message
> is flawlessly readable at the other end

That _is_ the raison d'être for MIME after all.

> As a technical rule, however, which is important for the question
> whether a message is fully RFC compliant or not, it does not make
> sense.

To be fair, the RFC does recognize that they weren't able to specify
exact rules at the time:

   The character sets specified above are the ones that were relatively
   uncontroversial during the drafting of MIME.  This document does not
   endorse the use of any particular character set other than US-ASCII,
   and recognizes that the future evolution of world character sets
   remains unclear.

> BTW, if the rule were that we should use the smallest, most widely
> used coded character set which covers the all necessary characters in
> a message, then western European users should use neither Latin-1 nor
> Latin-9, but windows-1252.

No, because Windows-1252 isn't a standard, i.e. endorsed by IETF, ISO
or another reputable standards body.  (IANA registration doesn't make
it a standard -- anyone can in principle register any old homebrewed
charset with IANA).