Hello everbody. Gaetan reported a garbled message that i sent to him, and it turned out that S-nail has problems to generate base64 encoding when iconv(3) is also involved. This is mostly a problem with the message body, not with attachments with on-the-fly encoding (since then the entire file has been converted already). I.e., if base64 is not used (for data which goes over iconv) anything is all right. In fact Heirloom did not support base64 for that purpose as such, likely for that reason.
Well, all this is "normally pretty easy", you generate a filter chain (read data -> character set conversion -> content transfer encoding -> write data), but that is not how the nail MIME layer works. That in turn is -- i think -- mostly because the BSD Mail codebase, which is not MIME capable, works linewise, with a strong input line <-> output line relation, which is the wrong way to handle mail in the MIME world with multibyte character sets and odd input/output relation transfer encodings, and no effort has been taken to change that, yet. So. We now have a hacked (read: not final and the way i want it, i want the filter chain) solution which works and generates ISO-2022-JP mails just fine. I am not yet there because we cannot display those correctly again. I.e., we now have the strange situation that S-nail generates the messages correctly but cannot display them so, whereas Heirloom mailx generates octet-stream sauce with binary charset but displays the S-nail generated message just fine (just like mutt or OpenSSL). Tomorrow i will add a test that runs if we have iconv support. Not before that i will release v14.9.3, the "crested tit nibbling sunflower seeds". P.S.: The base64 decoder of S-nail v14.9.0 has learned to tolerate a lot of messed up content, and in fact it was the only one who was capable to display the generated data. It is a bit disturbing that i never got responses for likely messed up content in the passed, maybe all partners use S-nail for diplay purposes?!!! That is to say, i Bcc: myself and i never had a problem. P.P.S.: The base64 decoders that are around are pretty fault tolerant, you can embed criminal content at your will. For the future it is planned to log that in S-mailx, other MUAs and OpenSSL either are completely silent or do not dig it. E.g., you can split up base64 sequences, you can embed ! and many other such characters and they simply will be skipped over. Ciao. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)
