> MIME Quoted-Printable was designed to be a work-around-damage > solution at the time, and was not design to remove the need for > handling 8-bit data in SMTP.
I'd put this somewhat differently - QP was designed to be deployable in the near-term without first requiring MTAs, etc. to upgrade. If MIME had required that all SMTP servers be upgraded before sending MIME messages, then MIME would have failed. > So, my only point is that it appears that some work needs to be done > in the SMTP standards, and beating up on the MIME WG does not compute > given this observation. I don't think it would be controversial to write a BCP declaring that SMTP MTAs should support transparent relaying of all 8bit non-control characters in the message body. Neither would it change much - because most existing MTAs already provide this. Putting UTF-8 text in the message header is a different problem entirely. Keith
