Matt Parker matt@mpcontracting.co.uk
[...] Since QP is a recognised standard and grep/awk don't support it, don't you think that the pressure should be put onto the makers of those tools to update them rather than put pressure on QP users to take a step backwards? [...]
QP is part of a totally irrelevant standard. You might as well write that IPv6 is a recognised standard, so don't you think that pressure should be put on grep's maintainer to support it? (I'll probably get email about some grep that does now.)
I don't have a resistance to using 8bit, just that KMail came pre-configured to use QP and I'm happy with it.
I think you'll find that either KMail or its users are abusing QP, using it when it adds little but bloat to messages.
Plain 8bit is only a sensible choice from the point of view of people who insist on using tools that don't support it. Personally I'd prefer to step upwards again to using Unicode, but then there'd be a real outcry.
I've been using UTF-8 for some time now, because I need to access characters not in ISO-8859-1, which is why I aim for my setups to use extended mail only when they need to be extended now.