Re: CHAT: Corrupt messages (was CHAT: Doug Ball, PhD)

I'm on another mailing list with similar issues.  Frustrating, since
this MIME stuff is 16-year-old tech at this point.  Seems like we'd
have it down by now.



On 12/15/08, Lars Mathiesen <thorinn@...> wrote:
> 2008/12/15 Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>
>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 00:44, David McCann <david@...>
>> wrote:
>> > I get my CONLANG messages in a daily digest. If the problem doesn't
>> > occur with individual emails, it could be that the server at Brown is
>> > just taking the individual emails, each with its own encoding, and
>> > sticking them together.
>>
>> Ah, that could well be the case -- that the list server isn't 'clever'
>> enough to re-encode all messages into one consistent encoding.
>
>
> We had the same discussion a little less than three months ago, where David
> McCann was stumped by base64 in his digest. I still haven't checked for
> myself how a digest actually looks at the MIME level, but I think you're
> right.
>
> With the open source MIME support libraries available these days, it would
> be a SMOP to make a digest where all the mails are converted to Unicode and
> encoded in utf8/base64 -- and there can't be many mail clients left that
> won't handle that.
>
>> In that case, naturally my software will assume
>> > that the same encoding occurs throughout.
>>
>> Quite a reasonable assumption, and indeed, the only possible one,
>> since you can't just put a new email 'header' (announcing a new
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding or charset, for example) into the middle of
>> the email's body. (Unless you use MIME multipart digests.)
>
>
> Like the multipart/digest MIME type, for instance. It's almost as
> lightweight as the current digests, and just as human readable even if the
> mail reader has no support.
>
> --
> Lars
>
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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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