This may be a dumb question, but I'm stumped:

Say I have a email message I've created correctly in Perl, with a Content-Type charset of UTF-8, and an Content-Transfer-Encoding of, "8bit".

I want to pipe this message to sendmail.

What encoding do I set the pipe to sendmail to? Again, I'm assuming the message is in Perl's internal format and I've done everything else correctly when creating the message when it comes to decoding, etc.

I want to say I encode in UTF-8, but it would depend on if sendmail command handles things this way. Does it? My policy has been, "Assume everything is in UTF-8"

What if the Content-Transfer-Encoding was "quoted-printable"? Then, it seems I Wouldn't have to use encoding at all, since none of the email message (again, if I did everything corretly in creating it) would have a UTF-8 flag on it.

I've already confused myself with this simple train of thought, as encoding gets tricky.