gnats/136: gnats doesn't handle qp/mime email well

[raeburn]

>Number:         136
>Category:       gnats
>Synopsis:       gnats doesn't handle qp/mime email well
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    unassigned
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Jan 30 17:04:01 PST 2001
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Ken Raeburn
>Release:        gnats-3.99-beta
>Organization:
>Environment:
Solaris 2.6, with MIT Kerberos support
>Description:
It's becoming more common these days to get problem reports using
quoted-printable encoding and/or multipart mime messages.  It
would be a great help to have the QP decoding done before
storing the mail (probably could be done as an input filter),
and extra mime parts handled in some reasonable way.  Certainly
attachments should be kept around (perhaps as separate files), I'm less sure 
about
multipart/alternative stuff.

Many years ago, when MIME use was fairly new, I would've considered
this a missing but non-essential feature.  These days, I consider
it a serious obstacle to deal with.

I'm looking at deploying 3.113 to replace 3.99-beta, but it looks
like it still has no support for this.
>How-To-Repeat:
Send in a bug report by email using mime and quoted-printable.
Watch the db entry get so mangled (including discarding mime-related
mail headers) that you can't decode it without manual tweaking.
>Fix:
Decode mail on input, save multiple parts.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: