On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 13:40:58 CST, John Traweek <[log in to unmask]>  said:
> 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?

There's nothing *illegal* about it, but keep in mind that some mail systems
may still be so wedged in antiquity that they will say "can't handle 8bit".

The RFC's recommend scanning through the body and only using 8bit if actually
needed,  This shouldn't be a big performance hit, as you probably only need
to do so for text/plain and text/html bodyparts (which tend to be not more
than 10K or so in size).
--
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech