From: J.B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2003 - 14:11:55 CST
On 3/4/03 2:32 PM, Bruce Lilly at <blilly@erols.com> wrote:
> It will fail because, as Russ' chart clearly shows, utf-8 in the
> message header fields is incompatible with IMAP, as has been
> discussed at some length.
IMAP is clearly incompatible with news AS IT IS USED TODAY. Whatever the
official story, 8 bits is used in approximately 15% of the USENET text
traffic.
Any attempt to say "mail and news are the same" fails if that FACT is
disregarded. It doesn't matter if you call them "illegal", "non-compliant"
or "purple people eaters", they exist today, and will exist tomorrow. If
IMAP doesn't want to carry such posts then fine, but I don't see how it
makes any difference whether it doesn't carry them because they are in a
local charset or in UTF8. IMAP has clearly decided that *it* doesn't want
such pollution,
And saying that because it's "non-compliant" people should stop and adopt
some new standard is simply silly -- either those 15% have rejected using
the existing 7 bit encoding, and are almost certainly going to reject a
brand new 7 bit encoding, or they are using clients that can't do the 7 bit
encoding, and they aren't going to be able to do the brand new 7 bit
encoding either.
Either way, it's still clear that IMAP doesn't want to deal with them unless
they use a 7 bit encoding, which is fine -- but that's a limit for people
using IMAP, not something that we should attempt to impose on people using
news (because the best result that can reasonably be expected is that they
ignore that part of what we say, most likely they ignore everything else as
well).
Which is a long winded way of saying: moderation is IMO a potential problem,
IMAP shouldn't be more than a *minor* consideration.
-- J.B. Moreno