g wrote:
this i understand. where i believe it to be a waste is when a plain text file is attached and it is converted to mime.
Well, if you want it attached and not just a part of the main body of text you *have* to use MIME: MIME is what enables attachments in Internet e-mail.
also, a waste is to send a text message in 'base64'.
Depends. I’d argue that what is *really* a waste is that most mail clients have to encode 8 bit e-mails with quoted-printable or base64, for reliability reasons¹.
Base64 can actually lead to smaller e-mails than quoted-printable when the underlying text message is not in a Latin-based alphabet (think Far Eastern, Greek or Russian).
James.
¹ There are still a very few places that can’t handle 8 bit e-mail, and rather more e-mail servers that can’t transcode 8 bit messages into some 7 bit encoding when they relay to a traditional SMTP (not ESMTP) server.