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From: Kyle Jones <kyle_jones@wonderworks.com>
To: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: Bug in vm
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Hrvoje Niksic writes:
 > Kyle Jones <kyle_jones@wonderworks.com> writes:
 > 
 > > I think you mean "binary" instead of "8bit".
 > 
 > Yes.
 > 
 > >  > [...]
 > >  > The real question is: why did VM choose to use base64 instead of
 > >  > quoted-printable?
 > > 
 > > Any MIME body in a composition that would require a 'binary'
 > > content transfer encoding gets BASE64 encoded.
 > 
 > Is this a MIME requirement, or a VM design decision?  Heiko's message
 > could have been encoded quoted-printable just fine.

Mostly an accident.  There's one routine that looks at a message
and decides what the non-opaque transfer encoding should be.  It
returns "7bit", "8bit" or "binary".  There's another routine that
uses that return value and decides what the final transfer
encoding should be.  This routine doesn't get any information
about NULs or anything else; it only knows that the non-opqaue
encoding is "binary".  The only safe encoding for binary data is
BASE64, so that's what it uses.

