Re: POP3 UTF-8 support

RW <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > Making such a drastic, incompatible change to 822/2822 -- allowing
> > > non-encoded, non-ASCII charaters in the header
[...]
> > 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.

It actually is a pretty big deal; RFC2047 wouldn't exist if it wasn't.
There's a *lot* of software out there that (rightly or wrongly) parses email
headers for information, and a lot of it predates the very existence of
Unicode, much less UTF-8.  RFC2047 was created because so much software broke
if there were *any* high-bit-set octets in the email headers.

> 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.

ISO 8859-* are single-byte character encodings.  Some software may have
accepted them without issue, but I suspect a Unicode codepoint that encodes to
a UTF-8 sequence that contains an octet of 10 or 13 might break stuff.

MUAs are much more likely to have been updated to handle weird stuff.  The
stuff that's going to break is weird scripts that do things like process
incoming emails to stick data in DBs, etc.

Charles
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Charles Cazabon
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