Re: [Nmh-workers] base64 ... just looking for advice

[David Levine]

Wolfgang wrote:

> And I feel that parsing and modifying the actual content
> of the message parts is something that should NOT be done.

> OTOH, we might always have such a problem.  We cannot know if even
> a text/plain part comes in some internal format that includes
> information about the used character set.  So converting is always
> a somewhat risky operation.
>
> It depends on the user - speaking for myself only, I would happily
> accept this risk for text/plain parts, as the number of cases where
> this is really helpful is huge compared to ny theoretical pitfalls;
> for text/html I hesitate, as the very first example I ran into shows
> such a problem.

It seems that we're in complete agreement, with the possible exception
of not wanting to decode encoded non-text/plain parts while still
decoding text/plain parts.  mhfixmsg -decodetext is not selective:
it decodes each encoded part.  We had (briefly) discussed this here a
while back.  I don't think it's worth the added complexity of an
interface that would allow selective decoding.  (And I always want to
decode base64.)

David