slight quibble with Google Calendar

[chhotii]

I use some old-fashioned e-mail clients for my personal e-mail accounts. Normally this is not a big problem: the e-mail I get from friends, LJ, etc., are usually pretty readable. But Google Calendar is one of the offenders. It's sending me e-mail that looks like this:

QWxleCBNb3JnYW4sIHRoaXMgaXMgYSByZW1pbmRlciBmb3INCg0KVGl0bGU6IGh3ICMyIGR1ZQ0K
VGltZTogVHVlIERlYyAyIDEwcG0gliAxMTozMHBtIChUaW1lem9uZTogRWFzdGVybiBUaW1lKQ0K
Q2FsZW5kYXI6IGFsZXhAcG9uZHNjdW1tZS5vcmcNCk93bmVyL0NyZWF0b3I6IGFsZXhAcG9uZHNj
dW1tZS5vcmcNCg0KDQpZb3UgY2FuIHZpZXcgdGhpcyBldmVudCBhdCAgDQpodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmdv
b2dsZS5jb20vY2FsZW5kYXIvZXZlbnQ/YWN0aW9uPVZJRVcmZWlkPWEyUm5NbVJ5WkRsdU0yVnJO

Got that?

The e-mail goes on to say:

RGh6TVdSaGFXZGhNVE53TURRZ1lXeGxlRUJ3YjI1a2MyTjFiVzFsTG05eVp3JnRvaz1NVGtqWVd4
bGVFQndiMjVrYzJOMWJXMWxMbTl5WnpBNFlUWmpNVFkwT0dNMk5tTm1aREEwWm1RM1l6Rm1Oelpr
TkRCaE9EWTRZV1U1T1RBd1pUZyZjdHo9QW1lcmljYSUyRk5ld19Zb3JrJmhsPWVuDQoNCllvdSBj
YW4gYWxzbyB2aWV3IHlvdXIgY2FsZW5kYXIgYXQgaHR0cDovL3d3dy5nb29nbGUuY29tL2NhbGVu

...and on and on like that for a few pages. Informative, huh? This kind of mail is both for invites and reminders from my own calendar.

Not sure what I'm going to do about this. Stop using elm? Annoying. Sigh.

Comments

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

That really looks like it's uuencoded image data or something. Maybe you're not viewing the text-only portion of the emails? Maybe it's no longer being sent with text-only portions?

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

MIME encoded... base64. UUEncode always starts each line with an "M".

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

And if you start plugging that text in to something like http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/Default.aspx you find that yes, there is content there.

I don't know why you're sending base64 encoded mail now, but really, any modern mailer SHOULD be able to deal with it.

The latest version of ELM seems to date from 2005... I'd've expected that to deal with base64, really.

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

I know I sent you an invite today and Alan Wexelblat ran into some kind of problem from my Gcal invite

[candle-light.livejournal.com]

So did I. It looks pretty much like what A posted above.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured out that one of these e-mails came from your invite. (Because, after scrolling down a bunch, I found some VCARD-formatted stuff which was almost intelligible.) So I sent you e-mail back. Did you see that?

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Spiffy! I'll check it out.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

You can retain your crotchety-luddite-old-geezer bit and still deal with those annoying things using emacs/RMAIL. I use the "etach" elisp package for the attachments and gratuitous base64 plaintext encodings folk send out.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Oh, really spiffy! I do use emacs/RMAIL on my primary account. I'll have to figure out how to get the etach thing going.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Stop using ELM. Seriously.

Here's the problem: elm predates RFCs 2045, 2047, 2048 and 2077 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME), and was never updated to implement them. This makes it completely useless for sending or reading email in the modern era. Google calendar is, honest to god, doing nothing untoward: they're using a set of standards that have been in place for email for over 12 years now. It's like using a copy of Netscape 1.0 (or really, Mosaic 0.7) to read modern web pages: it'll just sorta barely work, but it's only going to aggravate you more and more as time goes on.

If you like text-based mail clients, a recent build of mutt (http://www.mutt.org) or Alpine (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/) are your two best options.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

There's a huge difference there, at least for me. In the web world, using a web browser gets me content that I want, because modern extensions provide a lot of utility. In the email world, the last decade's worth of RFCs provide, basically, fluffy crap. My mail reader will deal with most of it transparently when I want it to, but it doesn't actually add anything fundamental to the medium.

(As a stopgap, piping the entire message out of elm and through the only-slightly-less-archaic metamail will deal with such encodings for you, but yeah, mutt and alpine are both good and have better support and user interface design vs. elm.)

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

In the email world, the last decade's worth of RFCs provide, basically, fluffy crap.

This is, putting it mildly, a matter of personal preference. But regardless, the point stands: mail software that doesn't correctly implement MIME is going to fall down when it attempts to read the output of software that does.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I second the pine/alpine recommendation. I've been using pine for ages, and it seems to work fine with the MIME encodings.

And a Google calendar event invite email appears to display properly in pine, based in my single test instance.