Re: Sending attachments

[Daniel Pittman]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>> From: Chad Brown <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:33:56 -0700
>>
>> I doubt that you can make mail-mode usable for the mime- handling
>> features that multiple packages want from message-mode without
>> significant (mostly duplicated) effort.
>
> Could you please post a list of the features you had in mind, so that
> the effort could be estimated?
>
> Just looking at email messages with MIME attachments, it looks like
> each attachment is just a fancy header line and a body encoded by
> either base64 or quoted-printable.  Implementing a simple command that
> asks for a file name and then encodes it and puts the result in the
> *mail* buffer sounds easy enough, so I'm sure I'm missing something.

If you do decide to go the simple path, don't encode anything but text/* MIME
content as Q-P.  Various mailers, especially on Windows, take Q-P as an
instruction to un-Q-P the text, then convert line endings to the platform
format.

This violates the spec, but causes corruption of attachments.  Gnus, for a
while, selected the optimum of Q-P and base64 for size, and I found the above
issue when PDF files selected Q-P and ended up corrupted on Windows.

Regards,
        Daniel