News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Making email more modern with JMAP. Parent comment

Re:Making email more modern with JMAP by shakna on Saturday August 17, 2019 @11:06AM (#20724381)
Converting to base64 generally increases the payload size. Being able to convert it that way is a workaround - not a solution to being able to transmit binary information.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Making email more modern with JMAP by dtech on Saturday August 17, 2019 @05:11PM (#20726421)
Well yes, but all emails I've ever seen already have their binary attachments encoded as base64
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Making email more modern with JMAP by shakna on Saturday August 17, 2019 @05:38PM (#20726584)
I received two emails yesterday with application/octet-stream as part of the inner body, compliant with RFC2046 [0]. Having a Content-Transfer-Encoding of base64 is entirely optional.

It's the default for certain larger email hosts - that's the reason you see it frequently, but that in no way means that it is the _best_ option for a protocol that suggests it's solving the problems of the old one.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-4.5.1

[ Parent | on HN ]