Charset mandatory in unix/linux

[Arnt Gulbrandsen]

Ned Freed writes:
> Since it does mean that in email, I fail to see why such a change 
> would be (a) Correct or (b) A good idea.

If «content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii", «content-type; 
text/plain» and a missing content-type field are equivalent, I would 
say that encoding the character set is mandatory in email, just as 
Jakob Palme wrote in the first message. A message sender can't avoid 
specifying the character set, even by leaving out the charset 
parameter.

Arnt