Re: Problems with attachments in S/MIME encrypted messages from Outlook

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Dave Goldberg <david.goldberg6@verizon.net> writes:

> At work, we recently moved to an all Microsoft email solution (yuck!)
> from the corporate IT perspective.  That is, the mail servers are
> Exchange but users are expected to use Outlook.  Those of us who use
> other mail/calendar clients are on our own, though they did enable
> IMAP and iCal so we're not shut out.  S/MIME is used for signing and
> encrypting as it was in our previous environment.  Lately I've been
> receiving encrypted messages that contain attachments and Gnus is
> unable to deal with them.  I get this error when attempting to save or
> view the attachment:
>
> Error while decoding: (error Illegal `=' character while decoding base64 22139)

Does M-x toggle-debug-on-error RET give any clues to where this
happens?

> and the resulting file is corrupt.  That last number is not always the
> same; it appears to be the position of the illegal character, though
> by my count it's off a bit (more on that below).  Since I couldn't
> find that error message in any lisp code, I guessed it was built in to
> XEmacs.  So I tried loading the base64 stuff from mail-lib but other
> than no error being reported, the results were the same - a corrupt
> file.

The base64 decoder in emacs is a bit picky, I recall.  But there could
be some other problem (CRLF?).