Re: [PATCH] Allow hand-editing of patches before sending

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> 
> Heh, well the copy thunderbird wrote directly to my mailbox is also
> 8bit.  And thinking about it I've seen talk of MTA's not supporting 8bit
> xfers between themselves, so thats probabally when it gets switched.

If your ISP mailer doesn't answer with "8BITMIME" to your EHLO, your mail 
client is supposed to downgrade to a 7-bit format (or the same thing can 
happen anywhere in between on one of the other hops).  Of course, that 
would be a really old and broken mailer, and if you find one of those at 
the ISP you use, you should probably switch ISPs.

Some other mailers have other issues, and qmail for example is apparently 
totally broken (it accepts 8-bit input, but cannot forward it properly to 
somebody who wants it converted to 7-bit).

And some of us use "fetchmail" and ask it do do mimedecode for us, so that 
even if it arrived as 7-bit crud, we don't have to see it. So the fact 
that some people see it as 8-bit can be because the hops to them didn't 
involve a broken remailer, but it could also be because something in 
between (like fetchmail) tries to fix it up after the fact.

That said: it tends to be unusual to see true 7-bit mailer setups these 
days.

So the most _likely_ cause of unnecessary 7-bit QP crud is not in fact a 
7-bit mailserver, but usually just the mail client that is just lazy and 
just sends out everything as 7-bit because it's too bothersome to even 
look at whether the mail server supports 8-bit data. Check your 
Thunderbird settings - it's quite possible that there's a flag there 
somewhere to turn on 8-bit mail transfers.