Pavel Kankovsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> (*) If yes, what extra functionality was provided? (Apparently, it was
> not an ability to transfer non-English plaintexts because you do not
> know how to interpret bytes you receive without MIME (or MIME-like)
> metadata.)
It was, in fact, an ability to transfer non-English plaintext and your
contention is wrong in a lot of circumstances. There is a *lot* of mail
in the world, not written in English, sent between two people who are both
using the same language and encoding, which isn't marked with MIME
metadata but nonetheless is interpreted just fine by the affected parties.
This is particularly common with mail internal to organizations.
This is an ongoing argument; I've seen plenty of examples both in Europe
and in Asia where unlabelled 8-bit content, while not the best way of
doing things, is very common and doesn't cause problems.
Anyway, that's also a bit apart from what Dan was talking about, as I
would assume that Dan was talking about the 8BITMIME SMTP extension, not
the MIME conventions for body labelling. The former is even less
necessary than the latter.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
