On Oct 27, 2004, at 3:19 PM, Dan Poirot wrote:
-----Original Message-----
Not sure how one would do this if one is Chinese and using hotmail for email... In the 21st century one might suggest that if a base64-encoded message in a non-western character set is unreadable, the problem is on the receiving side not the sending side.
C
...so perhaps you would prefer if Wolfgand responded to the list in German calligraphy script in the form of a 10 megabyte TIFF file?
Hard to use 'grep' on that...
Looks, if your mail-searching tool doesn't decode base64 before doing its search, then your mail-searching tool is broken. If your mailing list archive tool won't map character sets for you so that "foo" matches the representation of "foo" in some oddball character set, then your mailing list archive tool is broken. And if you want to search an un-indexed mail spool which hasn't been QP/base64/uuencode/MIME decoded using grep, then you should seriously look into the "formail" utility which comes as part of the procmail package. You can then apply MIME transforms on each message in your un-indexed file before piping to grep. Of course it'll be slower than an amputee sloth, but hey, if you want to search large archives quickly, then index them.
Look, ultimately, Wolfgang gets to make the rules for his list, and I'm not suggesting otherwise, but really, when the only reason you choose to not read someone's email message asking for help is because your email app is broken, it seems a little bit rude to suggest that the problem is on the other end.
C
PS Not trying to get everyone all upset, but in my previous life I did a lot of email processing stuff, and MIME/character set issues are really trivially solved these days with the vast amount of very high-quality decoding libraries available out there.