[ale] Email, base-64 decoding

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009, Brian Pitts wrote:

> On 06/22/2009 03:49 PM, Ken Cochran wrote:
>> Seems that nowadays I get more & more email that appears to be
>> base-64 encoded.  Is there any way to decode these messages
>> without resorting to web or a gui mail client?  "Berkeley"
>> mail just gives me something that looks like it's uuencoded
>> and mutt might decode it but if what's inside is html, that
>> doesn't work either.  I need some kind of command-line tool
>> a la munpack; ideas?  What typically generates email in this
>> crazy coding scheme in the 1st place?
>>
> It looks like it's a hack to make to work around MTA's that don't
> support UTF-8.

Indeed, mail is specified to be ASCII only, so anything outside of that range 
must be encoded somehow.

However, resorting to base64 encoding costs more than it saves.  It is simpler 
to implement standards-compliant encoding that way, but it is absolutely 
horridly wasteful when it comes to bandwidth.

And yet, more and more email programs these days seem to encode text as base64 
for one reason or another.  I have seen some Web-based mailers, as well as 
Microsoft software, that does this.

 	--- Mike