Re: RMAIL, MIME-related bug

[Stefan Monnier]

> When we convert the email to babyl format, we can do some MIME-related
> processing on it, for example: all text/* bodyparts may be
> transfer-encoding (quoted-printable and base64) decoded, PGP/GPG
> signatures verified, PGP/GPG decryption done, header fields of type
> =?...?B?...?= decoded (RFC 2047) and unfolded (RFC 2822), etc.
> This needs to be done once. No information is lost in this step. No
> structure information is lost either.

In order not to lose information, you need to keep the GPG signatures you
have just verified since you can't re-create them yourself.  Of course, you
also need to keep the signed-text unless you're super-extra-careful to make
sure that you can re-create the exact same byte-sequence from the rest of
the data, which is rather unlikely.

Why do people even consider doing any processing at that point?
The processing should be done for display and nothing else, because any
other option will make you lose information at some point and also forces
you to have code to re-create the original format, whereas the "display-side
processing" approach only needs to parse MIME but never needs to
re-construct it.


        Stefan