Re: Rmail-mbox branch

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard M. Stallman writes:
 >     Forgot an important point (of course): After such a manipulation
 >     [undoing quoted-printable- or base64-encoded msg and hand-decoding it],
 >     is it clear that the file is a legitimate mbox file,

*chortle* mbox is a bastard format.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html is the canonical reference
here.

 >     usable by other applications?

Usable, no.  Applications that use mbox will expect the headers to be
100% ASCII; non-ASCII content must be represented as MIME-words.

MIME media-type text bodies may use Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit,
which would allow you to save the predecoded text body.  But who
cares?  Nobody sends multimegabyte text/plain messages; decoding per
display is not an efficiency problem.

MIME media-type multipart bodies need to be left as is, in case the
user prefers an alternative decoding in other applications.

Other MIME media-types can't be saved in decoded format, since that is
going to be an Emacs internal data-type (consider image/png).

 > I am not sure.  If it isn't valid as an mbox file, perhaps
 > it is true that Rmail/mbox needs to do this decoding
 > each time it displays the message, rather than just once
 > (as some have claimed before).

s/\(It\|perhaps\) //g

 > If you edit such a message, how can Rmail/mbox save the edit?  Perhaps
 > it needs to re-enode the changed message body in the same encoding
 > that the message used.

Yes.