Bug#932: Pine over-encodes files and auto-requests document

[Raul Miller <rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu>]

Dale Scheetz:
   For you, maybe it's a bug. For a large number of other users the
   forced base64 encoding is useful for plain text and uuencoded files
   because base64 does not use the blank or the dot (as well as
   several other characters, it think, that cause troubles) in the
   output code set. This allows those text and uuencoded files to pass
   through various mail filters that would otherwise mangle the text
   in some fashion. As a result this feature IS NOT a bug. Since the
   ^R feature provides the unimpeeded transfer of plain text (and
   uuencoded) it is not even feature poor in this respect.

^R is a good idea.

Quoted Printable ought to solve the problems you raise for unusual
messages.  [Or are you claiming the MIME standard is broken in this
respect?]  QP isn't an optimum solution, but is better than base64
[[most of the time I've seen QP applied, it's preserving junk like
extra blank spaces at the end of lines -- even uuencode hasn't
depended on these for ages.]]

Also, a mime character set declaration ought to be sufficient for all
but broken mail transport agents -- this ought to be a compile time
option (use system char set) if nothing else.

This should be put in the hands of the Pine developers.

--
Raul