Thanks for writing this up, Jörg. Your article is a great explanation of
this problem.
However, I question whether simply publishing an article like this is an
adequate solution to this problem. If we are aware that major email
providers are corrupting emails and we've been unsuccessful at
convincing them to fix their servers, then it would seem to me that, "Be
generous in what you accept, and conservative in what you generate,"
applies here. I.e., I think we need to do more.
The simplest solution would be to make mail.strictly_mime=true the
default. Slightly better would be to leave the default how it is now,
but expose the setting in the user preferences with documentation there
rather than requiring it to be set in the configuration editor. But
perhaps the best solution would be to support a blacklist of domains
which are known not to handle 8-bit MIME properly and use
quoted-printable whenever sending to a domain on that blacklist. We
could have a built-in blacklist of domains we know are problematic and
allow the user to add additional domains.
jik
On 7/30/19 5:45 AM, Jörg Knobloch wrote:
Thanks for writing this up, Jörg. Your article is a great explanation of
this problem.
However, I question whether simply publishing an article like this is an
adequate solution to this problem. If we are aware that major email
providers are corrupting emails and we've been unsuccessful at
convincing them to fix their servers, then it would seem to me that, "Be
generous in what you accept, and conservative in what you generate,"
applies here. I.e., I think we need to do more.
The simplest solution would be to make mail.strictly_mime=true the
default. Slightly better would be to leave the default how it is now,
but expose the setting in the user preferences with documentation there
rather than requiring it to be set in the configuration editor. But
perhaps the best solution would be to support a blacklist of domains
which are known not to handle 8-bit MIME properly and use
quoted-printable whenever sending to a domain on that blacklist. We
could have a built-in blacklist of domains we know are problematic and
allow the user to add additional domains.
jik
On 7/30/19 5:45 AM, Jörg Knobloch wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Ryan suggested to create a SUMO article for this. Since I don't have
> rights to create articles at SUMO, I wrote it up in the Wiki.
> Foolishly I chose a URL with a dot at the end and linkify excludes the
> dot to clicking on the link doesn't work in plaintext e-mail. But for
> the archives, plaintext is preferred. Here's the link:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Jorgk/8-bit_bytes_and_e-mail_corruption_at_Verizon,_Yahoo,_etc.
>
> In this HTML version, clicking should work.
>
> Volunteers for the SUMO article?
>
> Jörg.
>
>
>
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