kmail forward message without base64 encoding

[g7ewo]

Hi All

I have a question about forwarding messages which have base64 encoding as plain text.

I have 2 email accounts, one is my main address and the other i only use for mobile access from my phone, i have set up a filter to forward only important messages from my main account to my mobile account, this works fine for most messages, except sometimes i get messages on my phone which i cant read, i believe this is because the message is encoded as base64 which my phone can't decode.

I have contacted Orange (my phone provider) and Nokia without any joy.

Is there any way of decoding the base64 message before forwarding to my mobile account?

I am using Kubuntu 10.04 with kmail v 1.13.5

i have tried to pipe the message through mimencode but this fails.

Thanks
Graham

[GreyGeek]

Re: kmail forward message without base64 encoding

base64 is installed by default on Kubuntu. It both encodes and decodes armored text.

See "man base64" for parameters. You might have to copy and paste the encoded text to a separate text file to apply base64 or, perhaps, the "-i" parameter may ignore the trash.

[g7ewo]

Re: kmail forward message without base64 encoding

i have just looked at base64 and i seems to act the same as mimencode, ie if i pass the whole email to it , it fails, however if i only pass the encoded part of the message to base64 (or mimencode) then it returns plain text.

Is there a way to pass just the body of the email to base64/mimencode via the pipe command in kmail's filters, and what would the outcome be?

The contents of the encoded emails display as plain text when reading in kmail, and don't appear to contain any special characters, but on viewing the source, it is still encoded.

I need to have this working unattended, so any cut and past operations would need to be done in some sort of script - python, tcl etc.


Any thoughts would be appreciated

Graham

[GreyGeek]

Re: kmail forward message without base64 encoding

Graham,
I don't know of any app that can parse a kmail email and extract an embedded base64 armor.

This site has some options for attached armor.
http://linux-suse.net/Sams-SUSE.Linu...3lev1sec4.html

[g7ewo]

Re: kmail forward message without base64 encoding

Well, after searching through many web pages/forums i have not found a ready made solution apart from installing procmail MDA and setting up a recipe to filter the mail through mimencode, but this is a bit of an overkill for what i need.

So, i have written a tcl script which splits off the email body, pipes it through mimencode -u, then rebuilds the email and passes it back to kmail .

This seems to have solved my problem
Thanks for your input

Graham

[GreyGeek]

Re: kmail forward message without base64 encoding

Pretty clever, Graham! 8)

It's been years since I used TCL (to create a front end to one of my PostgreSQL databases). I've moved to Python for that stuff.