Re: archives of the list? / base64 attachments?

["Johan Kullstam" <kullstam@ne.mediaone.net>]

Matt McClure <matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu> writes:

> Are messages to this list archived somewhere?
> 
> I apologize if this has been talked about hundreds of times already.  Is
> it possible to attach a file to a message using base64 as the Content
> Transfer Encoding?  Every attachment I've sent has been encoded as
> quoted-printable by gnus.  I'm using pgnus 0.96.

yes.  look at the variable mm-content-transfer-encoding-defaults.  put
in your .gnus.el the following incantation:

(setq mm-content-transfer-encoding-defaults
  '(("text/x-patch" 8bit)
    ("text/.*" qp-or-base64)           ;; <- i am strongly considering
                                       ;;    plain base64 here
    ("message/rfc822" 8bit)
    ("application/emacs-lisp" 8bit)
    ("application/x-patch" 8bit)
    (".*" base64)))                    ;; <- this was qp-or-base64

the doc string for qp-or-base64 claims that it will choose the `best'
encoding format but my experience is that it always uses
quoted-printable regardless.  

for compressed binaries, the quoted-printable representation is much
larger than base64.  quoted printable can easily double the size of a
binary attachment.  

quoted-printable is also slow compared to base64.  e.g., i takes
about a minute to send a 1 megabyte compressed archive with
quotedprintable compared to a second or two for base64.

quoted-printable is either broken up front or doesn't survive sending
by qmail.  

i see qp losing to base64 for all these reasons.  i don't know what
criteron is used to select `best'.  whatever it is, it seems bogus to
me.

in light of all this, i am tempted to change qp-or-base64 for text
junk to base64 too.

-- 
J o h a n  K u l l s t a m
[kullstam@ne.mediaone.net]
Don't Fear the Penguin!