From: Lawrence Greenfield (leg+@andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2003 - 17:38:51 CST
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2003 15:11:55 -0500
From: "J.B. Moreno" <planb@newsreaders.com>
[...]
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.
Is there a belief that those people are going to adapt UTF-8? Why?
UTF-8 displays just as badly as RFC 2047 on the small amount of UAs
that don't handle 2047.
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).
Saying IMAP doesn't "deal with them" is the same as saying RFC 1036
doesn't deal with them---neither standard does.
Some IMAP servers are more zealous in enforcing RFC 2822 than
others---most IMAP servers accept 8-bit characters in some fashion. It
is clear that all IMAP servers are broken when dealing with 8-bit
characters because IMAP servers need to interpret characters in the
header (in the appropriate character set) to function correctly.
So instead of saying "IMAP doesn't deal with it", you can try "is
incompatible with RFC 2822".
People using mail readers and IMAP servers to read netnews is one
factor why RFC 2822 compatibleness is a good thing.
Larry