Re: A bad journey (an apocryphal war story)

["Alain FONTAINE (Postmaster - UCL)" <fontaine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 11 Feb 92 09:50:09 EST you said:
>I thought I had understood from the discussion in Santa Fe that an
>(unescaped) end-of-line in quoted printable was always to be interpreted
>as 0D hex, 0A hex, regardless of the local convention for representing
>ends-of-lines in text files.  I don't see this spelled out quite so
>clearly in the current MIME draft.

Quoted-printable has strictly no technical raison d'etre. It has been
introduced to allow encoded text to be somewhat visible. If only the
presence of x'0D0A' in the text can produce a (hard) line break in the
encoding, quoted-printable produced by machines using anything else
internally to delimit lines will not contain any hard line-breaks.
Makes the encoding rather difficult to read. But there is more :
the line structure of the text will be lost when decoded on a machine
using another local convention. Or am I goofing once again ?

>However, it wouldn't hurt to restrict the types of conversion that can
>be done by a relaying MTA.  Such conversions should always be to a
>"safer" format.  So, ordering the content-transfer-encodings as follows:
>
>BINARY
>8BIT		QUOTED-PRINTABLE	BASE64
>7BIT
>
>you can only convert to something further to the right.
>
Does not help at all. Suppose, in my example, that host A sends
quoted-printable. The encoding would then be :

ABBP=0D
8=0Fj6z=e0*O<

If the gateway decodes and reincodes in base64, the final result will be :

41 42 42 50 0D 0D 0A 38 0F 6A 36 7A E0 2A 4F 3C

                                                            /AF