From: Crystal Kolipe <kolipe.c@exoticsilicon.com>
Subject: Re: mail(1) patches (UPDATE)
To: "Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)" <lyndon@orthanc.ca>, Walter Alejandro Iglesias <wai@roquesor.com>, tech@openbsd.org
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2024 04:24:17 -0300

On Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 11:52:27PM +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) wrote in
>  <fd28cb5e8724a761@orthanc.ca>:
>  |Don't just blithely assume you can drop in UTF-8 and that
>  |it will "just work."  There were a number of discussions
>  |related to UTF-8 email at the IETF meeting this week.  The
>  |consensus was that we haven't achieved interoperability yet,
>  |at least not to the level everyone would like.  I expect
>  |there will be one or more internet drafts coming to life
>  |to address this.  You might want to review the videos
>  |from the emailcore and sml WG meetings.
>  |
>  |I will try to find some time over the weekend to take
>  |a look at your diffs.
> 
> We had this last year already, in October i then posted
> 
>   Crystal Kolipe wrote in
>    <ZScwXX+zeDwrZtLx@exoticsilicon.com>:
>    |On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 12:36:48AM +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>    |> Non-7-bit clean headers need RFC 2047 (and/or RFC 2231) encoding.
>    |
>    |The use of MIME encoded words to encode header content is no longer
>    |considered best practice.  See, for example RFC 6532.
> 
>   Yes there is SMTPUTF8, which is a special protocol.
>   The /global MIME thing i personally have _never_ seen in practice.
>   I have downloaded the RFC on 2012-07-23.
> 
>    |But as Omar said, let's get the basics of any new functionality
>    |sorted out before jumping ahead.  We don't really want to break
>    |mail in some unexpected and non-obvious way.
> 
>   I cannot comment on that.  I am pretty sure i have never seen
>   /global yet.  Ie an archive search here reveals only three mails
>   where i mention them in the text; the last is from a thread from
>   nmh-workers@nongnu.org from July this year, and let me shamelessly
>   quote Ken Hornstein who said on 2023-07-23
> 
>    The message/global MIME type (a RFC822 message but with UTF-8
>    everywhere) has a suggested file extension of ".u8msg", which
>    I have never personally seen "in the wild" anywhere.  ¯\_(???)_/¯

This quote by Ken Hornstein is being taken completely out of context.

The original post to the nmh-workers list is here:

https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2023-07/msg00011.html

the "in the wild" comment is clearly in reference to the specific file
extension and not the message/global MIME type in general.

In fact, Steffen's own reply to that post is also talking about file
extensions and not message/global.

Of course, it _is_ true that SMTPUTF8 does not enjoy sufficiently widespread
support to avoid the need for 7-bit encoding of mail headers.

I said exactly that in the thread last October:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=169707758319650