Steve,
Yes, you are right, that UTF-8 or any type of 8-bit symbol is not
necessarily a reason for a mail program to send the message as
multi-part. (And that's why Jostein's messages go through despite his
abuse of the list with those strange characters... ;-) )
However, some programs do (unless specifically configured not
to do so).
E.g. alpine (pine) -- which is a classical Unix-shell mail program does
that. And this week, I finally discovered the option that disables that:
downgrade-multipart-to-text
And just minutes ago, while looking for something completely different, I
discovered that option again, in someone's old (circa 2005) tips for
pine/alpine users:
If you ever post to Usenet and for any reason your post contain accents or
in general "8 bits" characters, Pine will post a message which will be
unreadable in some newsreaders. To fix this problem enable [X]
downgrade-multipart-to-text.
http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/alpine-info/tips/index.html
That description made me a bit nostalgic.
I realized that I haven't used "Usenet" (not via Google-groups interface)
for about 10 years... But I remember that back in 1997, when I was
shopping for my SLR that ultimately happened to be Pentax ZX-5n,
I was reading one of the rec.photo. Usenet groups, and asking questions
there. AFAIR, the famous Henry Posner of B&H was responding in that group.
It's funny that people are still actively using those Usenet (Google)
groups. And here is a recent thread discussing Pentax K1 there:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo.digital/nHwuriadq7Q
Igor
steve harley Wed, 24 Feb 2016 14:34:12 -0800 wrote:
On 2016-02-24 13:46 , Igor PDML-StR wrote:
[Geek_Language On]
When that happen, the headers of the message would have lines as these
three:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
BOUNDARY="518673661-1546572836-1455812812=:60197"
....
And then the body of the message would be starting with:
--518673661-1546572836-1455812812=:60197
Content-Type: text/plain; FORMAT=flowed; CHARSET=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT
yes, any multipart message will probably trigger the current PDML
mailserver filters; one must avoid multipart in the current regime
the ideal behavior would be to have the mail server decompose the
multipart message and send only the part indicated text/plain (such parts,
for those who are not familiar, are delineated by the lines starting with
two hyphens)
Unicode should not be a factor — a good email client should not switch
from plain text to multipart just because you paste in a Unicode
character; i use UTF-8 all the time in my messages — em and en dashes (–
—), mu (µ), bullets (•), a few others — and Thunderbird sends plain text
only
however you may not realize when you copy/paste from a web page (at least
on Mac) the paste buffer includes formatting in addition to the text, and
some mail clients will attempt to stuff that formatting into your email
message, even if there is no visible difference; in some apps there is a
"paste plain" command; some others have a two-step undo from the paste,
where the first undo removes the formatting, the second removes the text;
when neither of these are possible, on Macs a one-line AppleScript can be
triggered from a keyboard to strip formatting from the paste buffer
command before pasting
--
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