On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 09:37:17AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted text
> However (and this is a pretty common thing), the *headers* are 
> unspecified, and a lot of email clients seem to think that if that 
> happens, they default to US-ASCII and think that those iso-latin1 
> characters are crud.

Well, that _is_ what the standard says, I believe. I agree with you that
practice is more important than a standard, and if there are high-bit
characters in the 'From' field, I think that using the body charset is a
reasonable guess (although keep in mind that the "body" could be hidden
below a multipart/mixed,  multipart/alternative, or some other arcane
structure).

But I really have no idea why fully mime-aware mailers refuse to use
rfc2047 encoding of the headers. In fact, my copy of the message you
sent (to which I am replying) has munged V