RFC 2047 (+ RFC 2231) in Usenet

[Ivan Shmakov]

[Cross-posting to news:news.misc, as I've just had a
conversation on this issue there.]

[...]

Now where would one look to see what the Netnews Article Format is?
The one titled "Netnews Article Format", of course! The latest is
RFC 5536. RFC 5536 doesn't even mention Unicode or UTF-8 or
RFC-5198, but it does have this tidbit: "The character set for header
fields is US-ASCII. Where the use of non-ASCII characters is
required, they MUST be encoded using the MIME mechanisms defined in
[RFC2047] and [RFC2231]."

Thanks for the pointer! I was pretty sure that the recent
revision of the netnews message format requires the use of
RFC 2047 for non-ASCII header contents, but somehow have failed
to find the relevant RFC itself.

[...]

[unknown]

Usenet is older than Unicode;
so, if you care about being "RFC·5536 compliant",
you "MUST" post pure US·ASCII, 7·bit headers.

"Windows Live Mail" ( build 15.4.3538.0513, July 2011 )
is ·not· "RFC·5536 compliant" when you check the
"Allow 8-bit characters in headers" option.

RFC·5536 is about posting, uploading, not downloading.
When downloading, better newsreaders allow for raw (un·encoded) UTF·8.

My posts aren't "RFC·5536 complient" but, still,
they work when and where I want them to work.
I care about certain results, not RFCs per se.