Re: [EAI] Body parts

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>]

> Really?  Your data collection sources obviously differ from
> mine, but my impression is that we've seen very little
> transmission loss or confusion in the last 10 or 15 years, at
> least among MIME-conformant implementations that follow the
> rules.

Well, of course if they all play well it should work :)

The Unicode list gets mail fairly regularly that someone complains they couldn't read :)

Remember that I'm suggesting this for apps advertising UTF8STMP, so there *should* be no loss of data by complying applications, since presumably they'd all be designed correctly.  For the misbehaving ones, as you pointed out there's already a problem.

I hear 99% of the code page related issues within Microsoft, and I've encountered difficulties with code pages from Hotmail, Live Mail, Exchange & Outlook.  Many of those are probably when receiving mail without proper MIME content-type information.  Other causes seem to be varying code page implementations between the sender & recipient &/or different interpretations of the standards or code page names.

Obviously recommending UTF-8 can't stop mail clients from doing the wrong thing, but if we could recommend a course that moves towards a single encoding, then the entire encoding-related class of issues should eventually start doing better.  As someone mentioned UTF-8 is being adopted by more mail clients, but it can't hurt to inspire people to support UTF-8.

FWIW: Mark Davis was happy to show that UTF-8 is now the most common web encoding. http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/05/utf8-web-growth.html Sure, web isn't mail, but it does reflect a general trend.

- Shawn


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