<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Markku Kolkka wrote: <blockquote cite="mid200507031522.23068.markkuk@tuubi.net" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Benjamin Sher kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika sunnuntai, 3. heinäkuuta 2005 12:59): </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">What, in plain English, is all of this 8-bit character stuff about? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> 8-bit characters are used to write in other languages than plain English :-) They are the characters that are missing from the US-ASCII 7-bit character set. "quoted printable MIME encoding" is a way to encode 8-bit characters into US-ASCII character set so that software stuck in the 1970's passes it through undamaged. </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">A follow-up question: What is "8-bit characters" in opposition </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">to? To </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Unicode? If so, in what sense? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> UTF-8 encoded Unicode contains 8-bit characters, so you get two layers of encoding: Unicode -> UTF-8 and UTF-8 -> MIME quoted-printable. </pre> </blockquote> Dedar Markku: Thanks so much for an excellent brief discussion. So I guess I should check the option in Thunderbird in case I get a message from somone still using an old email program that does not use Unicode? Right? Thanks again. Benjamin </body> </html>