Subject: Why base64 encode? (pine-3.91)

From: [email-masked] (Mark Lewis)
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 94 17:36:37 GMT

After recently sending some mail with a shellscript as an attachment to
a friend, I found out that pine had base64 encoded it.  This seems
rather stupid to me since no encoding was necessary (the file was
plaintext), and therefore doing encoding on it only served to make it
unreadable by mailreaders that aren't MIME compliant.

Surely pine should check wether encoding is necessary before carrying it
out on attachments?  Perhaps this is merely a problem with the
installation at my site (I hope so), but any info/comments are welcome.

	Mark.

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From: [email-masked] (Craig Paul)
Date: 20 Oct 94 14:21:16 GMT

> installation at my site (I hope so), but any info/comments are welcome.

If it behaves like one of our early version of another MIME compliant
mailer, then only 1 8 bit character will cause the mailer to encode
the entire thing. Our mailer supplier then changed the encoding to
Quoted-Printable so that only the offending character would be
encoded.

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 09:23:09 -0700 (PDT)

Craig and Mark:
Pine MIME-encodes all attachments, even text, in order to guarantee their
integrity when passing thru gateways.  (Sometimes integrity matters even for
text.)

When sending text to recipients without MIME capability, use Ctrl-R in the
composer (in the msg body) to include the desired text, rather than attaching
the text file. 

Even better would be to help your recipients get MIME capability, either via
a MIME-capable mail reader, or a stand-alone decoder.  For example, CMU's
"munpack" program will work well, and is available for several platforms
(e.g. unix, mac, pc, amiga).  It's available in ftp.andrew.cmu.edu:pub/mpack/

-teg

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From: Mark Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 16:04:15 +0100 (BST)

> composer (in the msg body) to include the desired text, rather than attaching

My point was that the attachment only contained 7-bit ascii characters 
and so integrity was not improved by base64 encoding it, it just makes it 
harder for people to read if they don't have MIME-compliant mailreaders.  

The reason I prefer to attach things like this rather than simply include 
them is because it makes it easier for people to extract them from the 
mail message (the attachment can be saved, rather than saving the mail 
message and deleting unnecessary stuff by hand).

	Mark.

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 08:22:18 -0700 (PDT)

Mark,
Unfortunately, your belief that only 8bit characters are subject to 
corruption by mail gateways and transport/delivery agents is incorrect.  

Were your assumptions correct, I would completely agree with your conclusion. 
However, long lines, trailing blanks, tabs, leading "From " lines, etc, are
all vulnerable to modification by certain mail transport or delivery agents. 
We believe that attaching a file in PIne, text or otherwise, should be as
reliable as sending it via FTP.  This goal cannot be achieved without encoding. 

-teg