On 2012-01-21, John Hein <[email protected]> wrote: > Most of the non-english email with "binary" payload I get is base64 > encoded or quoted-printable or q-encoding in headers. Does that mean > there aren't mailers out there sending raw binary or converting from > an encoding to binary before delivering it in the user's inbox? No, > just none that I've seen (or noticed at least) yet.
Are you American? Out here in the rest of the world, 10% (almost exactly) of my incoming mail arrives with Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > No - some day raw binary may flow freely over email channels. And I It does. Over here in Yerp we've been using ESMTP for decades - hell, even AOL uses ESMTP, and if the most primitive mail service in America can do it, surely the rest of American does too! > Will vm currently handle any case of raw binary in the payload of > a message? As I said earlier, I hope so, but I wouldn't be surprised > if it didn't (mainly due to aforementioned storage format). It certainly should - modulo the message delimiter problem, which is non-trivial. > (a) Whether or not to add a feature in vm to support re-encoding > base64 sections (or any arbitrary mime section) to some other > encoding. > > (b) Whether to fix M-S and/or V C text to grok base64 or other > transfer encodings (not to mention complications due to > character sets)... > (1) on the fly in-memory > (2) by way of doing (a) > > I think (b)(1) is best if it can be made "not slow" in vm. > > If someone adds (a), that'd probably be okay and useful in certain > circumstances, but the user would have to be explicitly aware of any > consequences when he decides to invoke that feature (e.g., > invalidating of signed messages, possible mail storage issues, etc.). > I don't think vm should automatically do any permanent re-encoding > of messages or message parts for its own needs (e.g., (b)(2)). I agree with that. I do an assortment of munges on my incoming mails (e.g. stripping out entire quoted messages), but *I* do it, and it's *my* fault if I lose something. I don't want my mailer doing it!
