Re: rmail and mime encoded patches annoyance

[Francesco Potortì]

>   From: "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org>
>   Date: Fri, 19 May 2023 07:39:31 -0400
>
>   A _very_ ugly solution.
>
>   Edit the message in question, remove the MIME-Version: field, convert
>   the sections you care about using base64-decode-region.  Save.  Rmail
>   will complain slightly about the message not being a valid MIME
>   message, but .. meh.

Bob Rogers:
>Seems to me that all you really need to do is to convert the
>content-transfer-encoding of the attachment from "base64" to (say)
>"8bit" to make it readable, in which case it would still be valid MIME.

I have routinely done something like that using macros for the last several 
years.

When I receive email with attached files that I need, I save the files where 
they belong, then I edit the email to remove the attachments and ubstitutte 
them with text  placeholders containing the file names.  Then I archive the 
email,  which is now much smaller than the original.  I have a macro which does 
this work for me in most common cases, and a couple of additional macros which 
care about converting base64 to utf-8 in some corner cases.