MML 'encoding' tag value ignored...

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

In trying to work out why a PDF file was being corrupted when sent from
Gnus to several Win32 mailers, I found two things.

Firstly, Gnus was selecting quoted-printable encoding for the PDF file.
This was then incorrectly decoded by both Outlook and Eudora on the
Win32 machine, resulting in a corrupt PDF file.

Specifically, LF => CRLF conversion was happening on the Win32 machine.
Now, I don't know the QP spec well, so I can't tell if this is correct
behaviour for the Win32 machines.

If it is, though, I think that 'application/.*' MIME entities should be
encoded with base64 exclusively, to avoid this sort of problem.


The second, and more serious (IMO) issue is that MML encoding ignores
the 'encoding' tag when encoding the buffer and relies exclusively on
detecting the encoding type.

This is wrong, as far as I can tell, when it comes to the arguments
passed to `mm-encode-buffer' from `mml-generate-mime-1'. The `encoding'
tag is not passed to `mm-encode-buffer' from the part definition.

This means that even if I specified base64 encoding in the MML tag
(as: <#part ... encoding=base64>), quoted-printable was chosen.

        Daniel

-- 
Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.
        -- Kahlil Gibran