Re: rough sketch of a potential solution

>>> But as soon as somebody wants to do anything like a perl
>>> script working on their mails, a procmail script, or anything
>>> in that direction, or even just use 'more' or 'less' to peek into
>>> their mail folders, it starts to matter big time.
>>
>> for better or worse we departed from that direction a long time ago.
>> for that matter, so has the most widely used operating system, which 
>> really doesn't acknowledge anymore that there is such a thing as 
>> plain text.
>
> From the viewpoint of email formats, we may have departed from that
> direction, but it wouldn't hurt at all if we could get back again.

Actually I think that expecting all mail tools in existence to be able 
to cope with raw utf-8 would be extremely painful.  Nor would it help 
those users who like to read their mail with more/less/procmail/etc - 
partially because many of those tools can't cope with utf-8 either (and 
some of them never will), partially because we've come a long way from 
the days when email was just unstructured, linear, text.  These days 
there's increasing demand for use of email protocols to convey things 
like voice and fax that don't even have a text component.