Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2012-01-21, John Hein <address@hidden> wrote:
> Most of the non-english email with "binary" payload I get is base64
> encoded or quoted-printable or q-encoding in headers.  Does that mean
> there aren't mailers out there sending raw binary or converting from
> an encoding to binary before delivering it in the user's inbox?  No,
> just none that I've seen (or noticed at least) yet.

Are you American?
Out here in the rest of the world, 10% (almost exactly) of my incoming
mail arrives with Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

> No - some day raw binary may flow freely over email channels.  And I

It does. Over here in Yerp we've been using ESMTP for decades - hell,
even AOL uses ESMTP, and if the most primitive mail service in America can do
it, surely the rest of American does too!

> Will vm currently handle any case of raw binary in the payload of
> a message?  As I said earlier, I hope so, but I wouldn't be surprised
> if it didn't (mainly due to aforementioned storage format).

It certainly should - modulo the message delimiter problem, which is
non-trivial. 

>   (a) Whether or not to add a feature in vm to support re-encoding
>       base64 sections (or any arbitrary mime section) to some other
>       encoding.
>
>   (b) Whether to fix M-S and/or V C text to grok base64 or other
>       transfer encodings (not to mention complications due to
>       character sets)...
>     (1) on the fly in-memory
>     (2) by way of doing (a)
>
> I think (b)(1) is best if it can be made "not slow" in vm.
>
> If someone adds (a), that'd probably be okay and useful in certain
> circumstances, but the user would have to be explicitly aware of any
> consequences when he decides to invoke that feature (e.g.,
> invalidating of signed messages, possible mail storage issues, etc.).
> I don't think vm should automatically do any permanent re-encoding
> of messages or message parts for its own needs (e.g., (b)(2)).

I agree with that. I do an assortment of munges on my incoming mails
(e.g. stripping out entire quoted messages), but *I* do it, and it's
*my* fault if I lose something. I don't want my mailer doing it!