Re: POP3 UTF-8 support

On Thu, 5 Aug 2021 18:32:57 +0200
Matthias Andree wrote:

> Am 05.08.21 um 17:09 schrieb Charles Cazabon:
> > Matthias Andree <[email protected]> wrote:  

> >
> > Making such a drastic, incompatible change to 822/2822 -- allowing
> > non-encoded, non-ASCII charaters in the header (as opposed to body)
> > -- seems like a pretty dumb idea to me.  There is a lot of legacy
> > software out there that is never going to be updated to handle
> > that.  
> 
> The thing is that systems behaving that way and offering 8-bit header
> and envelopes are creating their own disconnected islands until the
> entire subnet sending, transporting, receiving the e-mail is
> upgraded...

Is it really that big a problem? My expectation is that most
software would treat multipart character bytes as opaque data.

I don't receive email with UTF-8 headers, but years ago I have seen
emails with unencoded headers in ISO 8859-1 etc, and it didn't seem to
be a problem. Email clients tend to be forgiving of RFC violations.