FEDORA net etiquette

[James Wilkinson]

g wrote:
> this i understand. where i believe it to be a waste is when a
> plain text file is attached and it is converted to mime.

Well, if you want it attached and not just a part of the main body of
text you *have* to use MIME: MIME is what enables attachments in
Internet e-mail.

> also, a waste is to send a text message in 'base64'.

Depends. I’d argue that what is *really* a waste is that most mail
clients have to encode 8 bit e-mails with quoted-printable or base64,
for reliability reasons¹.

Base64 can actually lead to smaller e-mails than quoted-printable when
the underlying text message is not in a Latin-based alphabet (think Far
Eastern, Greek or Russian).

James.

¹ There are still a very few places that can’t handle 8 bit e-mail, and
rather more e-mail servers that can’t transcode 8 bit messages into some
7 bit encoding when they relay to a traditional SMTP (not ESMTP) server.

-- 
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