[Mailman-Developers] CTE "base64" due to UTF-8?

[Bjørn Vermo]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 10:59:16 -0400, J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu> wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:05:15 +0100
> Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> If you do have an 8 bit message, and are trying to send to a non 8 bit
>> recipient MTA, and will not transcode, you then have a problem.  You
>> can then either just send it (sod you, take this anyway) or bounce it.
>
> Which is particularly pernicious in the case of list servers.  Given
> enough 8bit-bouncing MTAs a single post can unsubscribe a poster.
>

I suppose that is why best practices in this area is to transcode when you  
connect to something which is not 8-bit clean, but never otherwise.
Not doing it might of course be a good way to rid the net of a bit of  
obsolete software... sites which are not able to be 8-bit clean must be  
really rare these days. I suppose somebody still has a PDP-8 or something  
running, and it does have a certain historical interest, but most  
protocols in wide use today assume an 8-bit clean transmission path. You  
cannot use http on a 7-bit system, for instance.

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