8bit mime support? (linked to thunderbird issue)

JL devm23k73ju29h3r at dolce-energy.com
Wed Jul 30 01:07:54 CEST 2025


Le 29/07/2025 à 18:33, Steffen Nurpmeso a écrit :
> bonjour,
:)

Buona notte,

>
>
>
> I see you meant it "beyond GPG", but in general.
> Here: as above, certain characters are not allowed in email
> protocols, and, as far as i see that, i do not think that will
> change.  So "anything binary", it will need an encoding.
there is a difference between a 33%-37% overhead because ALL is encoded, 
and 2 to 10 characters that have to be escaped...
>
>
> Fun fact.  The MUA i maintain still sends (in the released
> version) anything 8-bit over SMTP .. without using the according
> SMTP extension.  It does so for way over twenty years, and the
> program was a bit famous by then (long before i took
> maintainership).  I never saw nor heard complaints.
exactly... because the real fact is that email client are all supporting 
8bit MIME and UTF-8, that's why I'm sad to see still base64 in 
thunderbird because they had some strange issue with gpgME..... In fact, 
now, 99,9999999999% of server found on the internet are just handling 
char as 8bit, and they don't even notice that it's data... nobody do a 
"char & 0xEF" on every Byte he get to be sure to use ASCII table... 
that's why other ISO-8859-15 like encoding works.
>
>   |so why do we still ENFORCE 7bit ascii for something that is no-where
>   |more used? do you know a single 7bit CPU still there?????
>   |
>   |if you can handle 8bits, you can handle 7bits... so leave the oldies
>   |rest in peace and move forward.
>   |
>   |base64, 7bit ascii, EBDICT, base32... quoted printable... are just
>   |oldies... they had their use, they are now just no more needed and
>   |belongs to history... you still use the old 5"1/4 floppy disk?
>
> Certain people do the latter.
> And i think you overcomplain a bit, because for example the
> terrible but omnipresent XML and JSON do not support the full
> spectrum too, you need a different kind of encoding to pass data
> through them.  (There are certain SMTP extensions to send binary
> data though.)  As i love (an unconstrained) email i find it unfair
> to only complain on the very old (and misused) lady email, when
> those "new" protocols/formats fail to deliver what you want?

I don't complain about the old lady, I only see that the old lady will 
be abandoned because the people behind it are frozen... yes xml did suck 
a lot enforcing base64 (even if in a way having binary data in something 
that want to be human readable..... is somewhat stupid) they could have 
just made some tag saying "binary data start" and "binary data end" and 
let the "unicode compatible text editor" display an hex dump if it wants

anyway, that's not the mater, the matter is that there is a bug 
somewhere maybe in Thunderbird, maybe in gpgME, that prevented 
Thunderbird to encode the attachments in 8bit MIME.... and I won't say 
that Thunderbird's developpers reaction is the right one, since they 
preferred to do a workaround instead of having the bug fixed

best regards
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