[Email-SIG] koi8 and base64

[Ben Gertzfield]

koi8-r is an 8-bit character set; it MUST be encoded either with 
Quoted-Printable or Base64 in order to make it through 7-bit email 
gateways.

I originally wrote the mappings in Charset.py to show which charsets 
should be Quoted-Printable or Base64 encoded.  The only use for 
Quoted-Printable is for character sets that are mostly identical to 
7-bit US-ASCII; I didn't realize at the time that koi8-r's 7-bit 
characters were identical to US-ASCII.

However, koi8-r messages are usually mostly 8-bit characters, correct?  
If this is the case, Quoted-Printable encoding is hugely wasteful (3 
characters for every single byte!) and we should use Base64 instead (4 
characters for every 3 bytes).

Can you get me in touch with the SpamBouncer author?  I strongly 
believe flagging koi8-r messages as "suspicious" if they're Base64 
encoded is a faulty test.  Just because some mail user agents encode 
koi8-r with Quoted Printable doesn't mean that we should discount those 
that choose to use Base64.

Ben

On Apr 22, 2004, at 7:57 AM, Oleg Broytmann wrote:

> Hello!
>
>    Why koi8 is declared 'koi8-r': (BASE64, BASE64, None) in
> Charset.py? What is so special about koi8 that it requires to be
> base64-encoded? In my opinion there is nothing special, no more than
> windows-1251, which is not declared at all.
>
>    There is a minor problem with base64-encoded messages in koi8:
> SpamBouncer (http://spambouncer.org/) recognizes bease64-encoded
> messages in koi8 as "unneccessary base64 encoded" and filters them as
> "suspicious". The author of the SpamBouncer speaks Russian and can
> read/write koi8, so she knows what she is doing. And I agree with her -
> most MUAs send koi8 messages unencoded.
>
> Oleg.
> -- 
>      Oleg Broytmann            http://phd.pp.ru/            
> phd at phd.pp.ru
>            Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
>
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