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Re: [LUG] base64 email bodies (was Someone on the list rejecting email?)

 

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 02:24:29PM +0200, Juan J. Martínez wrote:
> El jue, 15-04-2010 a las 13:12 +0100, Gordon Henderson escribió:
> > On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Juan J. Mart?nez wrote:
> > 
> > > PS: I quit using pine myself in 2002, and because of the same
> > > frustrating issue of the base64 encoded stuff :P
> > 
> > Obviously I never got enough email from people in base64 for it to make a 
> > difference. Shame on you for having an email system that doesn't default 
> > to sending plain-text, or bother to check and adjust.
> 
> It is the default, but sometimes it can't be done and Evolution falls to
> base64 encoding. That's standard.

Actually, I believe the standard is to use quoted-printable if
possible, and base64 only if a substantial portion of the email is
non-ascii. (QP is closer to plaintext, but inefficient for large
amounts of non-ASCII. Base64 is more space-efficient but less
readable.) User-agents are supposed to use the simplest encoding
possible, or something to that effect.

> I blamed others too back in 2002, but at the end... the problem was
> Pine. I never tried to use Mutt, because life seems too short to learn
> it (and configure it properly).

mutt more or less just works, in my experience (I've been using it for
years now, so I'm kind of used to it by now anyway). I tried (al)pine
again recently, and although it was quite nice, using GPG was far too
much hassle.

-- 
Benjamin M. A'Lee || bma@xxxxxx || gpg: 0x166891C7 || http://bma.cx/
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after
being drunk all night. --- Isaac Asimov

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