Will FossaMail ever have yEnc support?

[fred8615]

...have yEnc support, and/or the ability to autojoin multipart posts? Without either, FM (and TB for that matter) is fairly useless as a Usenet newsreader.

And yes, I know in most cases downloading binaries from Usenet is violating copyright laws, etc. But even the legal stuff is almost all in yEnc too, which would still require the use of a third-party program either used with FM, or instead of.

If neither is possible, for whatever reason, I still believe you should strip the newsreader function from FM.

[Moonchild]

There are solutions for the yEnc encoding in FossaMail, like yproxy (converts yEnc to UUE on the fly). I think yproxy may even combine split posts as well, but I'm not sure.
I won't add yEnc to FossaMail because it is not RFC compliant, and requires news servers to also operate outside of the usenet spec to transport yEnc encoded messages.

FossaMail (and Thunderbird) are simply not binary news readers. They are readers meant for using usenet in its originally intended way: public, distributed discussions on various topics. That is the core of usenet in the client, and that is not something to consider removal of even if using the net as a free binary sharing portal that way has become more popular.

If you want to work with binaries newsgroups, then you should use a dedicated reader for it - or a third-party program to work with FossaMail.

EDIT: I just looked at the official yEnc home page (and some related articles) and the average age of all that material is 10 years or more.
So, anything remotely useful is at the very least completely bitrotted, and likely not even applicable to FossaMail's supported operating systems...

[Moonchild]

Looking at this some more, there is a proposed patch in bug #119964

According to your post, it's a de-facto standard, so decoding capabilities would be a "nice-to-have" addition for binary newsgroups in FossaMail. However, the latest patch is from 2003, applicable to Thunderbird 1.5, without multipart support (as far as I know).

If you are interested in getting this fixed, please provide a patch against the FossaMail repo or find someone who has time to write one and would really like to see FossaMail support this de-facto encoding method (instead of 8bit MIME which would be just as efficient). Without a patch, it's not going to happen; it's not even clear how exactly yEnc is defined in its documentation on the website.

Also, I've changed the topic title -- nothing is as annoying for a developer as to have a half-statement with ellipses. I tend to not even read those posts, since the "trick to try and make them click" doesn't work for me I need the info in front of me.