From: Dean Harding (dean.harding@dload.com.au)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2006 - 16:29:37 CST
> > UTF-7 is an obsolete means of encoding unicode characters.
>
> It's not without its uses. It's the only way I know of posting arbitrary
> text in Yahoo groups from the web pages (though e-mailing posts also
> works).
> Unfortunately, viewers have to manually tell their browser the post is
> encoded in UTF-7, and IE 6.0 does not support UTF-7.
It's also (unfortunately) quite popular with a lot of email servers. I don't
really know why, because UTF-8 + quoted-printable would have been just
almost as efficient, and you wouldn't need some custom encoder/decoder
that's almost-but-not-quite Base64 encoding...
But I certainly agree that I would steer well clear of any new application
that tries to implement it. In fact, even if you're writing some sort of
MTA, I'd just stick with implementing a decoder (so you can decode other's
UTF-7 emails) and stick with UTF-8 + quoted-printable (or something else)
for all outgoing emails.
Dean.
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