Subject: Re: use base64 instead of quoted-printable in format-patch headers

From: Štěpán Němec <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:55:24 +0200

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:
> The advantage of quoted-printable is the printable part. It's at least
> somewhat human readable, e.g.:
>
>     =?UTF-8?q?=C3=86var=20Arnfj=C3=B6r=C3=B0=20Bjarmason?=
>
> I have some chance of spotting a typo or something in there if I look
> at the raw E-Mail (which I often do), but not with base64.

...apart from all the UTF-8 bytes and/or unless the name does not
contain any ASCII characters at all; anyway, I don't consider this
argument very compelling, but see below.

> Are we sure we're correctly encoding quoted-printable? E.g. maybe
> ?UTF-8? instead of ?utf-8? would work?

As per RFC 2047, both the charset (`utf-8') and encoding (`q') are
case-insensitive, so this shouldn't matter.

> It seems odd that a widely used client like Mutt would screw up such a
> widely used encoding.

Actually, upon some tests and repeated closer examination, I obviously
mis-diagnosed the problem once again (I really apologize for all the
noise). It appears that when I send an e-mail from Mutt using the file
produced by `git format-patch' as a template (i.e. `mutt -H some.patch'
-> edit -> send), Mutt for some reason re-encodes the already encoded
`From:' header, resulting in

From: =?utf-8?B?PT9VVEYtOD9xPz1DNT1BMHQ9QzQ9OUJwPUMzPUExbj0yME49QzQ9OUJt?=
        =?utf-8?Q?ec=3F=3D?= <[email-masked]>

...which doesn't make much sense to me (or Mutt or Gnus).

So this probably really belongs in some Mutt help forum... I'm sorry.
(If someone knows how to work around the problem, please let me know).

Štěpán