> We use ListServ to allow clients to send out messages via distribution
 > jobs created by web applications.  Ever so often we have people who
 > will enter a message that contains an 8bit char, ie Microsoft curly
 > apostrophes or the extended dash.  Most mail readers can read these
 > messages, but some will either show the end user nothing or the
 > characters come across formatted weird.  I was wondering if I could
 > just include the Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit on all my messages?
 > Will this cause a problem for messages that only have 7bit chars?

John:

Setting 8bit won't break messages which don't contain 8bit characters.
However, getting the non-ASCII stuff to work is more complicated than
just using 8bit transfer encoding.  The character sets have to match
too, but it's hard to determine the character set of text someone
pasted into a web form.  Also, you can't necessarily assume that the
receiving client has support for every character set.  Finally,
sending 8bit encoding doesn't mean the user will receive 8bit
encoding.  For example, a mailer may recode from 8bit to quoted
printable if the mailer to which it must deliver doesn't advertise
8bit capability.

Dennis Boone
H-Net