Sharing a news story

[Bob Jonkman]

On 11-11-20 08:55 PM, waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org wrote:
>    No trailing garbage at all.  FYI, here's the raw message, with leading
> space inserted to avoid screwing up simple MUA's...
>
> =====================================================================
>   Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 13:54:54 -0500
>   Subject: [TLUG]: Sharing a news story
>   Message-ID:<edyds3onm8mm7ul27t4a8jvb.1321815294844-2ueSQiBKiTY7tOexoI0I+QC/G2K4zDHf at public.gmane.org>
>   From: Russ<rreiter91-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
>   To: "tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org"<tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
>   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>   Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
>   Sender: owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
>   Precedence: list
>   Reply-To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
>   X-Whitelist: Whitelisted (sender *@ss.org)
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>   SGVyZSBpcyB0b2RheXMgaG9yb3Njb3BlLiBBbnkgdHJhaWxpbmcgbm9pc2U/CgpodHRwOi8vbW9i
>   aWxlLnRoZXN0YXIuY29tL21vYmlsZS9ob3Jvc2NvcGVzL2FydGljbGUvMTA3Nzk1NQ==
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It's a wonderful illustration of the problem:  The headers declare that 
the text is Content-Transfer-Encoded with Base64 (a perfectly valid 
encoding for e-mail), but the contents of the message body includes the 
TLUG footer which is not encoded with Base64, thus corrupting the 
contents of the message body.

The problem is not  the MUA that Ross is using, but the behaviour of the 
mailing list software.  If it is going to add a footer, it should first 
decode the Base64 message body, add the footer, and then (optionally) 
re-encode to Base64.  Or the mailing list software could re-transmit the 
message with Content-Type set to Multi-part/mixed, with the message body 
in one part and the TLUG footer in another part.

It is a different problem than trying to get a particular MUA to send 
with a particular Content-Transfer-Encoding, which seems to be what Ross 
et al. are trying to do.  Even if you find a way to suppress Base64 
Content-Transfer-Encoding on your MUA it does not solve the problem of 
the mailing list software corrupting messages. Perhaps this MUA testing 
could be taken off-line.

--Bob.

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for 
Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1521

The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4648

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The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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