Re: 8bit mime support? (linked to thunderbird issue)

Andrew Gallagher via Gnupg-devel <[email protected]> Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:34:22 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 30 Jul 2025, at 19:35, JL <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> here what I get when sending a signed message :
> 
> 
> This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156)
> --------------O0jQavEJzad0tdgqdlXTuPu2
> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------FWDnkJ83p73oQajQk66iKNQY";
> protected-headers="v1"
> From: XXXXXXX
> Reply-To: XXXXX
> To: YYYYYY
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Subject: ZZZZZZ
> 

Yes, and here’s what I get when printing to PDF:

%PDF-1.3
%���������
3 0 obj
<< /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 364 >>
stream
&؀���k_L1lc�`�V�����.)���͋�Ŷ��HZ�}��!�5Y�CZޕ"��1�m�F�gv:��B�G�Y��
�+<���+$|�*r)+?fE���\{��D{S�                                   �Cԗ"�5
                             ]O���H˘�������`�[
                                              �����;��fs��j�@��p=�_�6�@B��sR���2fnM���M����3g:k��&��ه�"��Y�B{ڃ/5U��u��2Q�X�ș��b���(M�UoN�����f򑣁7��_�%�?�O�`p�!Ӌ�dc�D�
r���¢���1�a��&�g���
endstream
endobj
1 0 obj

What’s the problem? Emails and PDFs may *contain* plaintext, but they aren’t raw plaintext, and never have been. The fact that one particular encoding of emails happens to look very similar to plaintext IFF you are using a language that only requires US-ASCII characters is a historical curiosity. Email encodings are completely transparent to the end user if you use an actual email program and not a text editor.

My honest and heartfelt advice is to please stop worrying about it, it’s been a solved problem for several decades now. If you have limited disk space, base64 compresses really efficiently. Please don’t read your emails in vim, you’ll only generate excess cortisol and shorten your lifespan.

A

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