Browse: Home / / HoF Hates Base-64

HoF Hates Base-64

By barneyb on October 19, 2005

After some careful observation this morning, it appears that email I
sent do HoF mailing lists is being killed outright.  So basically
I'm cut off form the CF world until I either decide to change my email
address, GMail gets off their ass an switches Base-64 encoding back
off, or everyone fixes their mailing software.

I haven't decided the best way to handle this yet.  But for now, I'll probably just be silent.

Posted in

6 responses to “HoF Hates Base-64”

  1. bob
    bob
    October 19, 2005 at 11:21 am |

    have you tried changing the default outgoing message encoding from "default" to UTF-8 to see if that helps?

  2. Barney
    Barney
    October 19, 2005 at 11:26 am |

    Bob, you're a genius. For whatever reason switching from UTF-8 back to 'default' also sets the content transfer encoding back to quoted-printable, rather than base-64. It certainly appears to be problem solved.

  3. Michael Dinowitz
    Michael Dinowitz
    October 19, 2005 at 4:53 pm |

    Sorry. There was a ton of base64 spam in the past (and present for that matter) and messages in that format are blocked. I'll look over the code to see if I should remove the restriction.

  4. Alex Spurling
    Alex Spurling
    November 14, 2005 at 7:11 am |

    GMail doesn't seem to block messages encoded in base64 for me. In fact almost all the spam that gets through the filter is encoded in this way. For some reason Google haven't figured out that all they need to do to filter this spam is decode the message, read the message, then throw it in the spam box. There's no reason that spam should be unfiltered or normal mail be blocked just because it is encoded in base64.

    Anyone know when Google are going to sort this out?

  5. Barney
    Barney
    November 14, 2005 at 11:37 am |

    Alex, the problem wasn't with GMail not filtering base-64 message, but the mailing list software used by both House of Fusion and CFC-dev. Neither relayed base-64 encoded messages properly. The unknown was why GMail was _sending_ base-64 messages rather than quoted-printable.

    I have no idea about GMail's spam filters, other than that they do a good job filtering out the vast percentage of spam.

  6. Rob Brewer
    Rob Brewer
    February 2, 2006 at 1:53 pm |

    I'm having similar problems with gmail and
    another mailing list. My messages
    to the list were silently discarded (perhaps
    by the moderator) and I now believe
    it was due to gmail base64 encoding my
    message for no reason. For now I turned
    off utf-8, but I filed a bug report with
    gmail.