Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 12th Apr 2012 08:59 UTC
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Member since:
2007-03-26
Standard compliance is pretty good these days, even in Exchange. I can't vouch for the billion badly coded email clients but that's not an email problem, that's a code-quality problem.
Fair point there. However I still think the standard is outdated. For example, I don't see the point in transmitting everything as ASCII - in fact I personally think base64 should die. Anything that adds ~30% overhead to each and every attachment clearly isn't a sane standard for attachment encoding.
Content is encoded in exactly one way: MIME.
MIME isn't a single encoding specification, there's a few different variants (IIRC the biggest being 7bit and 8bit)
I can't think of a single modern SMTP server that doesn't support STARTTLS.
I will grant you that the biggest part of this problem isn't with SMTP server support but more mail hosts (lazy admins) not defaulting to TLS. I can't recall where I read this, but there's still a significant amount of e-mails being transmitted between mail servers without any encryption.
I can understand why most of the WWW is unsecured (viewing -for example- BBC News with SSL could be considered overkill), however e-mails often contain personal / confidential information and thus should be encrypted by default.