Re: C-T-E: base64 and the real world.. what should an MUA do?

If there's a padding "=" at the end of the base64, you can stop 
processing right at that point. You *could* also stop processing when 
you run into a non-whitespace character that isn't in the base64 
alphabet, such as the "-" or ":" in your example. It's not perfect.

	Tony Hansen
	[email protected]

[email protected] wrote:
> (Sorry I've been silent on this list for a while, I've been off doing other
> stuff for the nonce and only posting if something egregious happened to
> catch my eye...)
> 
> OK, so the following mail showed up on the linux-kernel mailing list (and it's
> not a singleton mail, I've seen this same broken behavior a lot lately...)
> 
> It had 1 bodypart, correctly tagged as
> 
> Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> Content-transfer-encoding: base64
> 
> Majordomo then goes and sticks some stuff on the end, so the last few lines
> of the message are:
> 
> --- cut here ---
> IGRldmljZV9yZW1vdmVfZmlsZShkZXYsICZkZXZ0X2F0dHIpOwo+ICAgICAgICAgfQo+ICAgICAg
> ICAgaWYgKGRldi0+Y2xhc3MpIHsKPgo+ICAtLQoKQXBwbHlpbmcgdGhpcyBwYXRjaCB3b3JrZWQg
> Zm9yIG1lLgoKVGhhbmtzIQogICAgICBNaWxlcwo=
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> --- cut here ---
> 
> Of course, the last 5 lines are bogus as base64, and it's easy to just say
> "Majordomo is at fault".  But such things happen in the real world, and what's
> the recommended algorithm for an MUA to recover from this?