[Mimedefang] Plug-in to transcode messages

Philip Prindeville philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com
Wed Mar 7 15:10:12 EST 2007


Kees Theunissen wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>
>   
>> There's no point in maintaining the integrity of a
>> message if it can't be delivered, or won't be read.
>>     
>
> And what's the point in transcoding a cyrillic or japanese charset
> into different encoded _but still cyrillic or japanese_ chars?
> Do you realy expect to be able to read the message afterwards?
> Are you perhaps also looking for a plugin to _translate_ the message?
>   

Let op, mijn heer.  Ik caan ein bietje neederlands
praten.

Wo dong i dien dien Juong Wen.

Hablo un pocu espagnol.

Je parle francais courrament aussi.

Just because I'm writing in English doesn't mean it's
my only language.

The point is that there was a requirement (or perhaps it
was just a recommendation... I don't have the text at
hand) that all email converge on these 3 encodings.

I rather like the idea of not having redundant encodings.

It makes writing filters a lot easier, for one.  It also
means that my browser doesn't need an N*M matrix of
encoding tables.

I also like the idea of conforming to standards.  But
that's just me.  I weird that way.


>> Those come first.
>>     
>
> What first comes if someone wants to communicate with me is the
> selection _by the sender of the message_, of a common language.
> If someone sends me an unreadable message (s)he has probably
> no intention to communicate with me in particular. It's simply
> cheaper to spam the whole world instead of only addressing the
> intended audience.
> Transcoding a message doesn't change that. It's just a big waste
> of CPU cycles in my opinion.
>
> Regards,
>
> Kees

Except that most encodings include USASCII, if not
some subset/variant of Latin1 as well.

Why do we need duplicated flavors of Latin1?

Because some moron at M$ wanted to build a
tower of babel...

Someone can write me in English (or Dutch or French
or Spanish or German... without accents, ij, or oe)
in jis2122... or windows-1252... In fact, someone
could write me in Japanese (which would be someone
more challenging for me to read since I haven't lived
there in 40 years) in BG5 or ISO2022CN...

So if your argument is predicated on their being a
single unique encoding per language, then that's
simply not the case.

-Philip




More information about the MIMEDefang mailing list