On 12 Mar 2018, at 22:44, J Doe wrote:
Hi,
I have a question regarding 8BITMIME.
I know Postfix supports 8BITMIME and does not support BINARYMIME, but
I am wondering why both 8BITMIME and BINARYMIME are ESMTP extensions.
It would appear that 8BITMIME solves the same problem as BINARYMIME
(allow 8-bit encoding of MIME), so why wasn’t BINARYMIME made
obsolete in the RFC’s ?
They don't quite solve the same problem. See
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3030#section-1 and note that the ability
to transport any 8-bit character as message content does not include the
ability to transport any arbitrary stream of bits. 8BITMIME is really
designed to avoid the need to use Base64 or Quoted-Printable for text
email messages using extended 8-bit charsets or UTF-8.
Also - because 8BITMIME seems to solve the problem without CHUNKING,
is that why Postfix supports it over BINARYMIME ?
I can't give a definitive answer to that, but it seems to me that the
added complexity of BINARYMIME+CHUNKING implementation and support is
too high a cost for what it provides over 8BITMIME.
