[imp] Content transfer encoding

[Jaap Winius]

Quoting Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>:

>> Could someone please explain how to avoid quoted printable for the
>> content transfer encoding of the message body? I'd like to see IMP
>> v4.1.5 use 8-bit MIME negotiation whenever possible, but that doesn't
>> seem to be happening in my case.
>
> Um, why?  8-bit encoded messages are illegal per the RFCs so IMP will
> *never* send a message 8bit.

Sorry, but I was referring to transfer encodings that are used to  
represent 8-bit binary data with characters from the 7-bit ASCII  
character set. See RFC 1652. It's good for supporting characters  
outside the US-ASCII range.

Exim4 has support for this with settings such as "accept_8bitmime". I  
know it works, because when I telnet to my server and issue an EHLO  
command, one of its responses will be "250-8BITMIME". As for clients,  
Alpine 0.99 can be configured with  
"Feature-List=enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation". If, e.g. I then use Alpine
to send a message with the UTF-8 character set and some Cyrillic text,  
it will include the header "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT". When  
viewing the message headers with IMP4, it's the very first one  
displayed. Right now, the messages I send all have  
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable".

Cheers,

Jaap