Why does Alpine encode text attachments?
Alpine uses MIME’s Base64 encoding for all attachments, including text, in order to assure that they are not modified in transit. The goal is make sure that sending file attachments in Alpine is as dependable as using FTP. Although it may seem like encoding is unnecessary for files that are plain text, certain email gateway, transport, and delivery agents pose a threat to the integrity of even text files (much less binary files). For example, long lines may be wrapped, trailing spaces deleted, tabs turned into spaces, lines beginning with “From” modified, etc.
