Hello Bryan and Radoslav,
In article <20170802015654.ga64...@c.brycv.com> you wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 08:19:23PM -0400, Radoslav_Mirza wrote:
> > Dear Group, Are there any places to start helping out for a beginner?
> > Any junior jobs or todo lists?
> >
> > I have a new Ryzen 1700 running OpenBSD so maybe I could help with
> > some benchmark tests etc.
> >
> > Any pointers of where to go would be great!
>
> There was a recent discussion about ProtonMail not sending plain text
> email which this list expects. I would suggest sending with another
> address and sending in plain text. Check the archives for more info
> about it but base64 encoded emails (like from ProtonMail) will likely be
> ignored. Hopefully ProtonMail will correct this problem but they have
> "started" on it for more than a year.
The first time I looked at the base64 encoded text pasted by Mihai
Popescu's (the first noticing this issue):
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc=149984510728808=2
I saw the message was written in English, what made me think protonmail
was doing something wrong, but more late I realized I'd overlooked the
first line, the quoted text reference author's name contained *one*
non-ascii character. :-)
To see it yourself:
$ cat file-containing-only-base64-part | openssl enc -base64 -d
This means what proton mail did in this case isn't incorrect.
As far as I understand, the purpose of this encoding (as the whole MIME
standard) is to send all messages through the net in plain ascii, to
assure compatibility among all servers. For example if I typed here any
non ascii character (what could happen even by accident when you use a
non English keyboard), Mutt, the MUA I use, would send the body of this
message quoted-printable encoded (the one used for low utf8 density
languages as Spanish; base64 is used i.e. for Russian). The same would
happen if some non-ascii character is in some sender's name in the
quoted text references; your MUA would detect that character and
automatically would send the body of your message encoded. Despite
base64, quoted-printable would still be readable.
Where is the problem. I guess developers here, when they don't have any
MUA from packages installed, are forced to use the one in base,
mailx(1), which doesn't support MIME. If this is the case, they'd have
troubles reading non ascii characters sent as is anyway. So, the best
workaround, whatever MUA you use, is to avoid using non-ascii characters
when you post to these lists (even in your name).
Said that I still find annoying top-posting and not hard wrapped lines.
But protonmail isn't the only one doing this. ;-)
(I'd add more common practices you can't blame MUAs as not using double
spaces after sentences, writing all in lowercase; the time they save
writing is charged to the reader.)
>
> Bryan
>
>
