ietf-nntp Standardization of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Matthias Andree said:
>> So my preference is still to treat articles containing bare LF as
>> ill-formed.
> Which will effectively render RFC-2045 binary MIME unimplementable with
> NNTP. (Makes me wonder if MIME needs a minimal-quoted implementation
> that just quotes 0x00, 0x0a and 0x0d.)

This has come up before.

A version of quoted-printable that permits all characters to be unquoted
except NUL, CR, LF, and = would suffice. Indeed, I suspect that many
implementations of QP would already produce the right output.

On pure binary data this would produce an expansion of 7.2% on average
(one character in 64 expands to =xx, and each set of 76 characters from
that expands to 79). This could be reduced to 4.2% by having a different
escape mechanism (e.g. octet 01 means "subtract 32 from the next octet,
modulo 256) and ignoring CRLF rather than assuming it's a real line break.

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