Re: charset flap

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RFC 1428, page 3.

   A site may "upgrade" to MIME en-masse by implementing MIME conversion
   for all messages leaving the site.  For text messages, the body can
   be converted by adding a MIME-version header and a Content-Type:
   Text/Plain with the character set in use in the site, provided the
   site uses a single character set.

   An appropriate Content-Transfer-Encoding header line must be added to
   indicate any encoding that may be necessary.

       MIME-Version: 1.0
       Content-Type: Text/Plain; Charset = ISO-8859-1
       Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

   If no information about the character set in use is available, the
   gateway should upgrade the content by using the character set
   "unknown-8bit". The unknown-8bit value of the charset parameter
   indicates only that no reliable information about the character
   set(s) used in the message was available.
..................and on page 5:
   The interpretation of the "unknown-8bit" is up to the mail reader.
   It is assumed that in many cases the human user will be able to
   interpret the information and choose an appropriate character set or
   pre-processor.

It is not widely used, as far as I know; any sane person would avoid it if he 
could. So should we!

                           Harald A

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