On 21/10/2024 22:45, Slavko via mailop wrote:
Dňa 21. októbra 2024 20:36:23 UTC používateľ Vsevolod Stakhov via mailop
<mailop@mailop.org> napísal:
There are many clear advantage of emails over homing pigeons if we talk about
communications. Could you please demonstrate what are the advantages of 8 bit
mime? Yes, it saves some small fraction of the traffic and CPU resources but
this is just negligible comparing to breaking e2e compatibility if there are
some middleboxes involved.
(I am not sure, if i will write this properly in English...)
I see a lot of advantages of homing pigeons, eg. no marketing
messages, phishing nor scams sent to random/harwested
addresses. No encoding, forwarding nor SPF/DKIM/DMARC
problems. They are environment friendly, etc, etc...
Overhead of 7bit it is not as small, it is not just wasting of 1 bit
from 8 (which itself is ~13 %), it is encoding wasting, with Base64
about +35 %, with QP it depends, as you already know (i hope).
Another wasting happens with encoded MIME-words, etc, etc.
It is wasting not only of CPU power or network bandwitch, it
is pontless environment wasting. But why to care about environment,
right?
I don't still accept your arguments about encoding overhead. We
**already** have a huge overhead of UTF8 for non ASCII texts. Do you
probably suggest to get back to, let's say, KOI8 for cyrillic characters
to save environment? It will give you like 100% improvement for sure.
It is 21 century now, computers commonly uses UTF-8, or even
UTF-16. Why we have to encode that to 7 b and then back? In other
words, the E2E compatibility is breaking who nowadays don't
support 8bit, not vice versa.
It is, but the world is very far from being perfect. About 15 years ago,
I would have been on your side: "let's burn the old world and build a
shiny new one!". It doesn't work in the real life. When I was working on
some TCP related research, the problem of middleboxes was really a huge
one (e.g. here is a nice article related to that:
https://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/system/files/hotmb11-hesmans.pdf).
We can't simply close our eyes on that in the email world either. I wish
we could use only relaxed DKIM as simple was broken by design (of
course, with shiny ed25519 and not dull RSA). I wish we could use only
SMTPUTF8 as everything before was broken by design. I wish we could
deprecate all encodings aside of UTF8. I wish we could bury all TLS
versions but keep 1.3 only. Finally, I wish I could even use IPv6 and
forget about IPv4 and dual stack.
Who cares about those wishes after all? The Internet is full of legacy
and we must accept it and try not to break E2E compatibility in the wild
world of the middleboxes of all sorts.
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