Is it safe to send 8-bit emails?

Question

I would like to know if it is safe to send emails with 8-bit characters or if it is still needed to use quoted-printable or base64 encoding.

The 8BITMIME extension is now 20 years old. Are there SMTP servers or mail clients that still are not 8-bit clean? Is there any impact on email deliverability when sending 8-bit emails?

Answer 1

I did not find any numbers but it looks like it is now quite safe to send emails with 8-bit body. But since the big players like Gmail still encode emails there might be some servers that still are not 8-bit clean.

However while sending an email with an 8-bit body might be safe, sending it with 8-bit headers is not.

RFC 2822 which was the standard until late 2008 prohibited non-ASCII characters in headers. RFC 6532 proposed a standard for 8-bit headers but it is quite recent (2012) and does not seem widely implemented yet.

So sending unencoded 8-bit emails is currently not safe.

Answer 2

There are still SMTP servers that haven't been updated to support 8BITMIME, so yes, you still need to check for the extension.