8bit mime support? (linked to thunderbird issue)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

JL wrote in
 <d0e9c13f-8f1b-41fe-ac47-7531b0357669 at dolce-energy.com>:
 |I wanted to open a ticket on GPGME because thunderbird team says they 
 |can't encode email using 8bit mime because of GPGME not handling 
 |correctly 8 bit content
 |
 |https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1966019
 |
 |8bit RFC is 30 year old, using base64 to "keep compatibility with old 
 |not maintained server/client" is energy/storage/network inefficient.

8bit brings you nowhere because of line endings for example, which
must be normalized.  This cannot be expressed in 8-bit.
Also, during fly, for example mailing-lists, message reencodings
happen.  (For example Mantis seems to enforce 8-bit *at times*,
mailman(2) is notorious for base64.)
Sometimes you need to use encoding anyway, for example overlong
lines, ^From_ lines (really SHOULD), control characters...
So content-transfer-encodings like base64 and quoted-printable
will not go away in the future, no matter what.


The question to me is why it disturbs you in practice, beyond
a possible mind itching -- the latter i can understand, but
actually, over time, turned into a complete SMTPUTF8 and other
such stuff well heavy disliker.
(I concur that Unicode for email local-part's must be done
somehow, but that is it; and message/global definetely not, for
me.)

My reasoning finally was and is that the email content
representation can never be an end-user thing, despite
sensational representations during engineer congresses.
The email headers become a more and more crowded mess (look for
example out Outlook.com header content), and certain parts of the
actual content will also always require "utilities" (image etc
viewer).
So in fact there is nothing plain text except for possibly (and
lesser and lesser so) a single text/plain part.
And for that alone, why all the hassle?

If you look at the email in a MUA, you will see the content as
desired, if you store the part somewhere on the disk it will have
been converted also.  I presume all that, say.

So why does it have to be 8-bit?

 |the thunderbird teams introduce workaround instead of working with GPG 
 |team to have the issue fixed.... seems that non gpg email are 8bit mime 
 |on thunderbird for the main message, base64 for the attachements
 |
 |would be nice to have the issue fixed so that base64 mime could be 
 |dropped, but don't know what is the issue they faced... maybe someone 
 |can participate on the thunderbird ticket so that the subject can go on?

--steffen
|
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