[leafnode-list] Re: Base64 coding in list messages

[Christian Ebert]

* Peter J Ross on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 21:38:45 +0100
> On Tuesday 21 October 2008 20:35:50 Christian Ebert wrote:
>> * Whiskers on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 20:17:04 +0100
>>> That's what I'm hoping to discover.  Base64 uses about twice the
>>> 'bandwidth' of 'quoted-printable', for one thing.  The only email
>>> software I've come across that uses Base64, is the email program on my
>>> Nokia mobile phone (which is a pretty poor excuse for an email program).
>> 
>> Might be Mailman, if it behaves similar to the Python email
>> module. There the default content-transfer-encoding for utf-8 is
>> base64.
> 
> Why? What's wrong with QP?

QP is better for ascii-*like* charsets that have a minority of
8bit chars, ie. "european" ones, for quasi-readability and
bandwidth. The bandwidth argument reverses for eg. asian charsets
(containing _mostly_ 8bit chars), plus they are completely
unreadable in QP as well. And, utf-8 being 21 century ;-), utf-8
contains a vast majority of 8bit chars ...

Some of the Python default content-transfer-encoding mappings:

us-ascii       none
iso-8859-1     QP
iso-2022-jp    base64
utf-8          base64

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