utf-7 encoding (Re: Howto: 32 bit skype, working with a webcam, on 64 bit Fedora 17)

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday, 22. October 2012. 11.25.04 Ian Malone wrote:
> On 22 October 2012 11:18, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > Tim:
> >>> Discouraged by who?  It's supposedly *the* answer to email
> > 
> > Ed Greshko:
> >> UFT-7 isn't widely used....  But if you want to use it go ahead.
> > 
> > You said it's discouraged.  I've never seen any such comment.  Where do
> > you find that advice?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7#cite_note-0
> http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html
> "It should be noted that the Unicode Standard also defines the UTF-7
> charset, which was intended for Internet mail. However, MIME is quite
> capable of carrying UTF-8, and UTF-8 is expected to be used in many
> protocols, not just Internet mail. Fortunately, very few vendors
> implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet
> mail."
> 
> Essentially it was never a great solution to the problem it was
> supposed to address (didn't really beat existing methods, UTF-8 in
> MIME generally turned out to be better). Still, whatever reader Marko
> is using should be able to handle it, if it is GMail then it's a bug
> in that.

I am using KMail (version 4.8.5 that seems to be current for F16). My gmail 
account is used only to transport mail, I almost never use gmail's web 
interface (it's just awful...). :-)

I looked around in the "set encoding" menu in KMail, but UTF-7 was not offered 
as a choice. UTF-8 and UTF-16 were, along with a whole bunch of others, but 
UTF-7 does not appear to be supported.

Maybe it's a bug, maybe it was ignored on purpose, maybe the devs just forgot 
about supporting a deprecated encoding system... Couldn't find out, google 
didn't find any relevant bug reports AFAICT.

But it doesn't matter much anyway. The bigger problem is the mailing list 
archives, as Ed pointed out. If I look at Tim's original post on the archives,

  http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2012-October/425826.html

one can see that the encoding isn't right. However, I can see that Firefox 
also does not offer UTF-7 as an encoding choice (and I bet none of the modern 
web browsers do), so anyone watching the archives will have trouble 
understanding Tim's e-mail...

Best, :-)
Marko