Fwd: RE: Newsletter Technical Feedback

[Simon Bowring]

On Thu, 06 Jul 2000 22:55:22 -0300, Trevor Smith wrote:

>Long story short: HMV sends a newsletter by email (actually this 3rd
>party, represented by the person below, sends it for them); said
>newsletter contains accented characters; said newsletter has 7bit
>encoding so accents show up garbled in OS/2. Bad considering the name
>of the darn thing (HMV communiqué) actually contains an accent!
>
>I told them, "hello, are you stupid? 7bit can't be used to send
>accented characters!" HMV forwarded to the 3rd party emailer and they
>replied:

It's perfectly legal to send 8-bit chars using 7-bit encodings like
"quoted printable".

Until recently, it was best to assume that all email and news
paths were not "8-bit safe".  It's very common to this day for
gateways to convert all 8-bit chars in email to equivalent
7-bit "quoted printable" format - no data is lost, the receiving
email s/w has to be able to decode the 7-bit quoted printable
stuff to normal 8-bit!

BTW: Quoted printable uses "=9F" without the quotes (so 3 7-bit chars)
     to indicate the single 8 bit char value 9F hex 

Simon