I sent this message on TBTECH first; it seems however that there is almost nobody reading the tech list, so I decided to resend it here. I recently submitted the problem described in this message as a bug (https://www.ritlabs.com/bt/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0002349); decided to also report on the list though - it would be interesting to hear what other people think. Hope it's still not too technical for TBUDL :).
If you choose an 8-bit encoding for your outgoing messages, but the message actually does not contain any symbols with decimal values higher than 127, then TB! would just make it "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit", when queuing that message in Outbox. Some people think this is the corrrect behaviour, and they refer to RFC2045 et al. Somebody even reported a bug https://www.ritlabs.com/bt/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0002343 - "Possibility to leave definition of 8 bit charset in case of message with 7-bit only without resetting to "us-ascii"" I still consider it definitely a logical mistake, and a serious one, since RFCs say octets with decimal values of 127 and up are not allowed in 7-bit data, but no one RFC says 0-127 should never be encoded as 8-bit - characters themselves are not intrinsically "7-bit" or "8-bit". As a result of this behaviour combined with some other MUAs' (e.g. Microsoft-made ones') improper behaviour, there is the following problem reported by various people. Suppose I send a message to my Ukrainian friend in Canada, and he replies in Russian. I know his MUA would try and put in the headers of his reply the same encoding as my message had. To save him time on checking, I would indicate I want _every message of mine_ (even if it's plain English only!) to be "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r / Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit", _which is perfectly legal in my view, as explained above. I compose my message indicating "KOI8-R" as the charset to be used, but... looking in the Outbox, I see "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii / Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit" there! Hope you get my point. www.livejournal.com uses UTF-8 for all those webpages, even though I do not use any Chinese or other double-byte characters in my blog there. I consider this to be a good example: characters, be they English, Ukrainian, Chinese, or whatever, are not "7bit", "8bit", "double-byte", etc. They _can_ be _encoded_ in various ways; and other than for those cases where it is just plainly impossible to encode them in a specific way (like it is impossible to encode Russian as 7bit), - standards do not prohibit us from using anything. So, seeing a good, standards-compliant, mail client like TB!, which calls itself "mail servant" :), I would like it to respect my will, _or_ at least to produce a warning when it changes (again, without a valid, standards-based reason!) what I've set as my default charset. Would you agree with that?.. My apology for this letter being rather long, - at least I hope it is not completely boring for everybody :). Maksym. -- Maksym Kozub, MK881-UANIC mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.02.3 CE | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
