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[Software] When did this start? base64 email messages?

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kent_dorfman766
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[Software] When did this start? base64 email messages?

#1 Post by kent_dorfman766 »

For grins I looked at my "message source" on an outgoing message under thunderbird and noted that the whole message was nothing but a stream of base64 encoded blocks. WTF.

I understand the encoding when you turn on PGP encryption, but unless you are encrypting the message then there is no good reason for force base64 encoding on text messages, and in fact, it's boneheaded thing for the mailer to do, since it makes it much harder to text scan mailboxes to find text.

I then did the obligatory google search on "disable base64 encoding in thunderbird" and got the expected useless chatter, but no real answer or discussion, and pretty much anything from mozilla is a no-mans-land when you have a question about it. Their support is as bad as asking google support.

Anyone know when this became a thing? base64 encoding messages by default? and can/should it be disabled? The only online reference I could find was to set mail.strict_mime to true, which I did with no joy...and it seems backwards to what it should mean.

My fear is that a recipient is running a non-conforming reader and when all they see is encoded blocks they will discard the message without taking any additional effort to read it.

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kent_dorfman766
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Re: [Software] When did this start? base64 email messages?

#2 Post by kent_dorfman766 »

No thoughts? Above the head of most lurkers in 2023?

Are there newer internet mail RFCs that specify/recommend base64 encoding of message content text, being widely adopted?

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Alice Wilton
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Re: [Software] When did this start? base64 email messages?

#3 Post by Alice Wilton »

My gmail.com messages are base64 encoded, but my disroot.org messages are in plain text. Maybe it depends on the mail server?

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Re: [Software] When did this start? base64 email messages?

#4 Post by kent_dorfman766 »

Alice Wilton wrote: 2023-05-26 02:13 My gmail.com messages are base64 encoded, but my disroot.org messages are in plain text. Maybe it depends on the mail server?
OK. I think that makes sense, but in simplest terms my outgoing composed message (written using thunderbird email client) is defaulting to base64. Would be nice to disable that, but doesn't seem to be any "publicly documented" way of doing so.

The use case deals with auto-generated emails from server. There are cases where I may wish to have a script craft an outgoing email message and use curl to send it thru the ISP email server. The server shouldn't do any conversion itself, but only modify the headers to show the "hop". My fear is that not all email reader clients will know how to automatically decode the base64.

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