Re: UUCP, etc., and SMTP/822/MIME mail (was: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8headers-00.txt)

> We are, I think, in complete agreement: we couldn't have rationally 
> done anything else than what we did, and the text you cite explains 
> exactly why we made that decision.  I was only suggesting that, faced 
> with similar decisions, but a new context, today, we are not, and 
> should not be, obligated to replicate the decision of what is now 
> thirteen or fourteen years ago.

Of course not, but nobody has really suggested that we do so.  At the 
same time there are some things about email that were true then that 
remain true now - one of which is that different pieces of the message 
header are generated at different places by different agents, which 
won't all use the same native character encoding and won't all get 
upgraded to utf-8 at the same time.