On Monday 17 October 2005 11:16, MJ Ray wrote:
On Friday 14 October 2005 20:09, MJ Ray wrote:
Ten's mail client (KMail) is using quoted-printable for plain text emails, which seems broken.
What, just the idea of using quoted-printable?
Using Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions for non-extended parts of emails does seem a broken idea to me. I realise that some people advocate using MIME for everything, because it's there, but the amount of MIMEd email nasties means that my bulk email client runs plain-text-only until I tell it otherwise.
Not so much because it's there with me, but since beginning to use kmail (ie since it became acceptable) I've become much more guilty of this.
That said, the indignant revulsion I reserve for HTML mails leads me to understand this viewpoint perfectly.
If so, KMail has been using qp in signed messages, and IIRC the PGP/MIME spec has the use of quoted-printable or base64 in such signed messages as a required/must.
Ah, yes, that rules out 8-bit. However, RFC 3156 says: "all data signed according to this protocol MUST be constrained to 7 bits" ...which means, if you're not sending 8-bit, you don't need to qp it. KMail seems to be qp-ing everything regardless. It's not as bad as gmail, which base64s everything regardless for some users!
Eugh!
Hope that explains it,
Yes, thanks.
As probably mentioned, on examining the mail to work out the cause for this behaviour (and to give ground to my evangelical faith in the One True Desktop Suite, of course :-) ), I'm pretty much certain that the 'thinking' behind kmail doing that was that there were trailing spaces and stuff in the email.
Now, whilst I'm not really au fait with the minutiae of pgp/mime, it seems that when sending the data via 7bit which had those trailing spaces _when it was signed_, encoding it as quoted-printable is a fair thing to do if you don't want your signature borken at the other end.
So teh issues would seem to be (1) me not cleaning up my spaces post-edit, and (2) trailing spaces getting signed.
Like I said, I don't pretend to be an expert on this, but that's my inference of what's going on there.. CMIIW :)
Also as a matter of interest, thank you for drawing my attention to rfc 3156, as the last one I read on the matter was 2015! Probably before the turn of the century, literally ( which should give you a rough idea of how au fait I aren't! ).
-- Ten
PS: Those who know about a certain proprietary software I worked on in late 2001 will pour scorn on my standards-compliancy naffness, but I should point out that I worked on the horrid flash-based update UI, not any of the manly stuff.