Convince send_mail to not base64-encode the email

[Matthias Urlichs <smurf@…>]

If you use utf8, mails will be base64-encoded by Python. That is a Bad Idea.

This patch tells it not to do that.

[Matthias Urlichs <smurf@…>]

Use quoted-printable, not base64, when mailing

[smurf@…]

Better patch: just replace the standard utf-8 charset.

The Subject: line seems to still be needlessly quoted-printable-encoded; I'll have to see what I can do about that. :-/

[Jacob]

Can you explain to be *why* this change is needed? I don't like checking in code I don't understand :)

[smurf@…]

• It blows up the mail for no good reason. Some people still have to watch their bandwidth...
• Many mail filters frequently don't MIME-decode emails.
• SpamAssassin and other filters assign a high score to base64-encoded mail, especially if the content is ASCII, because spammers use it to circumvent filters.

Reason enough? ;-)

[chris h.]

I'd second the vote to add this patch... we ran into an issue with a vendor consuming our e-mail and not being able to decode the message even though other e-mail clients like GMail and Lotes Notes were fine with it.

[nick.lane.au@…]

Perhaps the mime encoding type should be configured in the settings. Quoted-printable might not be the best choice for non-latin languages, while base64 may cause spam filter issues.

There is a ​ticket discussing this issue on trac's trac.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [5143]) Fixed #3472 -- Don't BASE64-encode UTF-8 (or ASCII) email messages.
Patch from smurf@….

[phr]

BTW, there's even better way to avoid unnecessary encoding:

from email import Charset 
Charset.add_charset('utf-8',Charset.SHORTEST,None,'utf-8')

The above will set Content-Transfer-Encoding to 7bit
or 8bit as needed - exactly as Mutt or Thunderbird do.

[Alex Gaynor]

Please don't reopen tickets closed by core developers (especially ones closed 2 years ago), if you think this is still an issue file a *new* bug.