Re: [PATCH] Try URI quoting for embedded TAB and LF in pathnames

[Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

> I find that email is very robust - it's basically 8-bit clean. No 
> character encoding, no crap. Just a byte stream. It really _is_ the most 
> reliable format.

I found another amusing bit of info that tends to undercut this claim.

This discussion thread is archived at
<http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=112877773400002&r=1&w=2&n=22>.
But there's an item missing from the archive: my message with
Message-ID <87vf02qy79.fsf@penguin.cs.ucla.edu>.  This is the message
with the joke "Aach!  Those Finns!  Always on the trailing edge of
technology!".

All my other messages are achived.  What was special about this
one?  Surely there's not a joke filter at theaimsgroup.com!

I nosed around through the archive and here's my guess as to what
happened.  My message's email header contained this:

   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

and my guess is that the web archiver can't handle that format.

This is just a guess.  I can't confirm it because (among other things)
the web archiver won't give me all the bytes of the messages that it
archives.  Even its "Download message RAW" doesn't do that: it omits
the header.  But I have a strong suspicion.  Let's put it this way: I
think mine was the only message in the thread that said
"charset=utf-8".

If my guess is right, the archiver dropped my email on the floor
simply because it contained UTF-8.  This is not a good sign for
putting UTF-8 into email, or for relying on email to transmit byte
streams.