[Ifile-discuss] Re: ifile and BASE64 mails

[clemens fischer]

Camillo Särs <address@hidden>:

> We don't want to lose too many possible features by stripping stuff
> from the mail.  Spammers tend to use shall we say creative
> interpretations of HTML and similar formats.

for ifile this isn't important.  let their creative markup be stored
as ifile tokens as spam-indicators!  i mean, you don't actually read
ifile tokens, you read the ham once cleared by ifile, but with your
mail reader.

the problem i discovered back when trying metamail was that one can't
just pipe an entire message through it, because it doesn't treat
headers any different than message bodies.  so it isn't really MIME
aware(!), because you would have to separate out headers and all MIME
parts to handle them separately.  this can be done:  parse out the
boundary and put every MIME part into a scratch file, then run
mmdecode on it according to content-transfer-encoding values, but
this is definitely no job for a procmail recipe, which was what i
needed.

btw, i just discovered mew (emacs news and mail reader) from
www.mew.org, which bundles mewdecode(1).  this program is ~ 20kB,
encodes and decodes base64, QP and the non-standardized gzip MIME
formats.  it can be operated as a filter, but i don't know if you can
pipe entire messages through it.

  clemens