MIME Encoding of attachments

MIME Encoding of attachments

[Mark Thomas]

I regularly deal with an MTA that wraps lines that are longer than
~~120 characters.  This usually isn't a problem, but sometimes when I
send an attachment as text/plain, it gets mangled.

What is the "correct" way to handle this?  Should I just use
application/octet-stream as the type?  Currently I set
mm-use-ultra-safe-encoding to t, which seems excessive; besides, the
doc-string for that variable says it should not be set directly.

Instead of having Gnus decide how to encode a part on its own, is
there some way I tell Gnus to use a particular encoding for a part?
Some special "encoding" tag I can add to the MML line, for example?

Cheers,

-Mark

Re: MIME Encoding of attachments

[Daniel Pittman]

On Fri, 01 Feb 2002, Mark Thomas wrote:
> I regularly deal with an MTA that wraps lines that are longer than
>~~120 characters.  

Complain bitterly to postmaster@stupid.domain and get them to replace
the b0rken MTA with some that can, like, actually not arbitrarily
corrupt data. ;)

[...]

> What is the "correct" way to handle this?  Should I just use
> application/octet-stream as the type?  

No, that will not help. You need something that will force the content
to be wrapped at < 120 characters. So, it's the
content-transfer-encoding that you need to change.

Of course, changing this means that plain text attachments are not going
to be readable any more without MIME decoding tools...

> Currently I set mm-use-ultra-safe-encoding to t, which seems
> excessive; besides, the doc-string for that variable says it should
> not be set directly.

>>From the sound of it, it /should/ work, but it's a bit of a
sledgehammer...

> Instead of having Gnus decide how to encode a part on its own, is
> there some way I tell Gnus to use a particular encoding for a part?
> Some special "encoding" tag I can add to the MML line, for example?

In theory, yes. You /should/ be able to specify 'encoding=base64' to
make this work, or possible, 'qp'.

I found this to be broken last time I tried it. Get the idiots running
the broken MTA to fix it. ;)

        Daniel

-- 
> What should I look for in a good bird bath?
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
} In a good bird bath? I'd expect to find birds.
} In a bad bird bath, tarantulas.