520702 - Need option to choose attachment encoding (content-type; content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit, base64 etc.), esp. for plaintext attachments (e.g. diff or code files)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Matěj Cepl]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090911 Fedora/3.5.3-1.fc12 Firefox/3.5.3
Build Identifier: thunderbird-3.0-2.6.b3.fc11.x86_64

(originally filed as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523911)
Thunderbird doesn't seem to offer an option to chose the type of encoding
attachments.

E.g. thunderbird seems always base64 encode '*diff' attachment. Also doesn't allow me to specify character encoding of text/plain attachment.

This practice is frowned upon in developer mailing lists, because it renders
reading *.diff's hard.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Attach a *.diff to a mail
2. send it to yourself.
3. Check the mail's source
Actual Results:  
Sent mail contains a base64 encoded attachment:
...
Content-Type: text/plain;
 name="foo.diff"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;

(and Content-Type doesn't contain paramter charset=...)

Expected Results:  
both attachment type and enconding of text/plain are chgebeable