Re: Strange problem replying to message

[Ken Hornstein]

>It is quite possible.

I guess I am a LITTLE surprised this is the first instance you've ever
seen where a text part was encoded with base64; I get those all of the
time (and not just in work emails either).  Maybe you get those more
often than you think and this is just the first time you wanted to reply
to such a message?  But yes, nmh out of the box does not handle that
well and it doesn't sound like there was any configuration change on
your side.  Note that I don't think anybody thinks that the current
default nmh behavior is optimal by any means, but fixing this natively
is ... complicated.

>Perhaps I am losing it but when I first looked at the header fields
>for the message that was giving me problems I could have sworn it said
>"Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64".  Now when I look at it instead of
>base64 it says 8bit. Am I confused or is that what mhfixmsg did, changed
>the message from base64 to 8bit?

As others have indicated, yes, that is exactly what it does.

>I also notice looking thru other messages that most say 7bit.

That is the "standard" encoding for ASCII email.  If people send text
parts with 8bit characters the encoding format varies.  I suspect
you probably see quoted-printable a fair amount, as my unscientific
impression is that encoding is a lot more common for text parts with
8bit characters.

--Ken