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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Heydekamp <my at freexp.de> writes:

    Michael> I'm aware of all of these problems but that still doesn't
    Michael> explain ...

    Michael> a) why Mailman recodes the UTF-8 body to base64 rather
    Michael> than qp (which would be the recommended and much better
    Michael> option for text/plain).

Probably because the people who wrote the code were Arabic or Korean
speakers, where pretty much everything but citation prefixes and line
endings is 8-bit.  QP is no more recommended than BASE64.  QP is
preferred if-and-only-if the body would be basically readable in QP,
which of course depends on the content.

So choosing intelligently would involve a count of the entire part to
be encoded.  Yuck.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.