Name
$=q
Synopsis
The EightBitMode
(8
) option (EightBitMode)
determines when and how 8-bit data will be encoded into a 7-bit
format. Ordinarily, the decision to use quoted-printable as opposed
to base64 is made by examining the input stream and choosing
quoted-printable if less than 1/8 of the first 4 kilobytes of data
has the high bit set. Otherwise, encoding is with base64.
Beginning with V8.8, sendmail offers the class
$=q
as the means to force the selection of
quoted-printable. Just before scanning the input data,
sendmail extracts the
type
and
subtype
from the
Content-Type
: header (Content-Type:):
Content-Type: type/subtype; ...
If the type
is in the class
$=q
, the body will definitely be encoded with
quoted-printable if encoding occurs. Also, if a concatenation of
type
, a slash (/
), and
subtype
is in class
$=q
, the body will definitely be encoded with
quoted-printable.
When sendmail first begins to run, class
$=q
is empty. A reasonable value in most countries
might be text/plain
(although probably not in
countries that use 16-bit characters, such as China). Other values
for this class might be text
or
text/html
.
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