Talk:Quoted-printable

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Is there a free unix tool to convert to plain text (iso latin) ?

[edit] unnecessary encoding

More and more companies automated emailers use quoted printable on all email, even through there are no 8 bit characters worth encoding. I would like this stopped. 66.114.93.6 04:00, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Are there currently any valid reasons for using quoted printable or base64? Many emails now specify 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit', so it seems unlikely that anyone would be using an email system that doesn't support this. I'd like to see this discussed in the article. Mike Dallwitz 23:38, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Quite a few systems still either don't support the 8bitmime extention or offer it but don't support it properly and have it disabled by default (exim comes in that category or at least it did last time I checked). One complication is that in order to support that extention in a way that complies with the specs and doesn't piss off users hugely a mailserver supporting 8bitmime has to be able to trasform messages to 7 bit only to allow them to be passed to servers that don't. This transform is non trivial (according to the RFCs parts of types under multipart and message must not use quoted printable or binary so the transform must break up messages into a tree, convert the innermost parts and then rebuild the message). Also note that even with 8bitmime some things can't be sent without using either quoted printable or base64 because of maximum line length rules.

As for the automated emailers is it really worth implementing the checks so it only sends in quoted printable when it absoloutely has to for the sake of a few percent bandwidth saving (assuming that the sender is sending mostly english messages with the potential for the occasional non english character). Plugwash 19:20, 11 October 2007 (UTC)