All you ever wanted to know about character encoding

[Chip Fetrow]

Another funny thing about e-mail is you cannot move context through  
it.  I was making a humorous comment, though that was lost.

I do understand the issue.

Now let me be clear that this comment is direct, and not humor -- HTML  
has no place in e-mail, and I just don't understand why people send  
HTML Mail, or why it might be something they would WANT.

If you need to send a picture, use an attachment or put in a link to a  
web page.  Links to web pages are good.

I can list a number of reasons if requested, but two of the most  
important are that we don't know what the receiving client is, and the  
recepient's bandwidth, and we don't want to send out something that is  
not universal.

I cannot tell you how it bothers me when I am in the middle of nowhere  
and someone sends me some HUGE HTML e-mail message.  Unlike  
attachments, it is hard to delay downloading them, if you want the  
rest of your mail.

--chip

> From: Mike O'Dell <mo at ccr.org>
> Date: March 13, 2011 1:41:10 PM EDT
> To: Chip Fetrow <tacos at fetrow.org>
> Cc: tacos at amrad.org
> Subject: Re: All you ever wanted to know about character encoding
>
> Andre can't have the accent in his email address,
> just like i can't type it in the body of a message
> without resorting to MIME encoding.
>
> that's because the characters allowed in an RFC822 email address
> are restricted to ASCII-96 interpreted as "all upper-case" (ie,
> the lower-case letters are "folded" to their upper-case counterparts  
> for
> the purposes of comparing character strings).
>
> so there is no way to put a "wide" character into a standards- 
> compliant email address