Yeah, but the intent of sending patches by email is that you do code-review by hitting reply and commenting inline. If you have to import the patch into your local git repo, or build tooling for seeing it in your email client, you're strictly worse off than with a web-based code review system.
Re:Maintainers Don't Scale
by chriswarbo on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @01:55PM
(#13474328)
> If you have to import the patch into your local git repo, or build tooling for seeing it in your email client, you're strictly worse off than with a web-based code review system.
That's either an argument against encoding patches, or for reading email in Emacs (M-x base64-decode-region). I don't suppose many would take the latter stance ;)
Hmm, sounds exactly like a use-case for Base64 and/or mime attachments. Perhaps it's worth persuing this, if there's no existing support?