Re: [VM] recoding mime parts (was: searching in mime encoded email)

[John Hein]

Uday Reddy wrote at 17:12 +0000 on Jan 19, 2012:
 > Saving the folders in UTF-8 or whatever (the actual coding system doesn't
 > matter), in a non-RFC format, seems to be needed to support search.
 > 
 > Does anybody know how the other mail clients do it, e.g., Thunderbird?

Thunderbird does (now) search through the base64 in multiple messages
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132340)... added in
2007-ish.

The quick search in TB doesn't work with (my) imap server if you
specify too many search qualifications (more than one header +
body?)... 'Invalid search parameters: (OR (OR FROM "foo" OR TO "foo"
HEADER CC "foo".'  It seems better with local folders.  It's a little
buggy but mostly works.

In any case, TB doesn't re-save messages in an unencoded format.  It
seems to do it in-memory on the fly.  Rudimentary confirmation with
strace.

It looks like they only do it on text/* parts.

I think that seems like the right way to go in vm, too (although
allowing the user to save a re-encoded part might be a nice feature,
too).

Before TB added this, I think it did work for searching base64 in
individual messages - "Find in this message" (much like
vm-isearch-presentation works now in vm, but folder-wide searches
don't).  But that's just my recollection - I could be remembering
wrong.

It doesn't seem to work right if the base64 encoded text/* is the
whole message (this is the opposite of how vm-save-message-preview
currently misbehaves in vm where it successfully decodes whole
message encodings, but not mime parts).