From: Kai Henningsen (kaih@khms.westfalen.de)
Date: Sun Nov 02 1997 - 10:50:00 CST
curtis_whalen@geocities.com (Curtis (Jewell) Whalen) wrote on 18.10.97 in <199710181540.IAA19959@geocities.com>:
> Autoconversion of 8bit, I've had reason to find out, is a BAD THING. I've
> seen
> =3D3D in messages because of autoconversion of an 8bit message with a QP
> bodypart.
> It's a waste, I know.
>
> I hate having to live with it.
That's when it's done wrong, either by the converter or by the original
sender. A correct converter will *never* do that to a correct message.
(MIME explicitely forbids double encodings.)
The obvious solution seems to be to offer a correct program (say, in C or
Perl) that takes a message, and then does the following processing:
1. Is this MIME? Then goto 5.
2. Is it 7bit? No, goto 4.
3. We're done.
4. Either reject, or convert to MIME with a suitable charset value
(whatever we decide is suitable, or local configuration).
Goto 6.
5. Is it 7bit? If so, we're done.
6. Convert message to use qp in text parts (and b64 elsewhere). Done.
and also a companion program that does this:
1. Is this MIME? If not, we're done.
2. Does it contain text parts in qp? If not, we're done.
3. Convert all text parts in qp to 8bit. Done.
Use the first when posting to moderated groups, the second before feeding
to a moderation script. Make the source completely public domain, so
commercial programs can use it, too.
Problem solved. (In fact, this even makes articles 8bit that were qp
originally, as long as the labelling is ok - you might want to do the same
for text b64 parts, for Pine lovers :-). And it should not corrupt any
signatures, either, if people have been obeying the rules.)
This can't break any message that's not already broken to start with.
Remember, MIME encodings done correctly are fully transparent.
I suspect such a pair of programs (with not quite the copyright I
advocated) will probably already exist somewhere; it's not that hard to
write.
MfG Kai