On 2026-02-26 at 21:20:13 UTC-0500 (Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:20:13 -0800)
Randall Gellens <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
(There was a time when sending anything that used characters not
present in U.S. ASCII did require a form of encoding, but these days
support for Unicode is pretty robust.)
I wish that were sufficiently true but as of last Spring, it was still
somewhat common for mail exchangers to not announce support for the
SMTPUTF8 extension which is required to avoid Base64, Quoted-Printable,
or (very rarely today) UUCode encoding.
Beyond that there is ALSO an issue of how to structure the text of a
plain text message so that it is displayed reasonably on screens of all
widths, in whatever font the recipient prefers. The ideal choice would
be for all MUAs to support the "format=flowed" attribute (RFC3676) and
offer users coherent formatting choices. MailMate does so but many MUAs
do bad things with format=flowed messages, as a consequence of Microsoft
sabotage and to some degree a failure of web archivers of public mailing
lists.
--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com
addresses)
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