this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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Some of the reactions are some in an effective way, and I assume this example is one of them. The problem being evidently they didn't think any what might be in big base64 blobs in the PDF, and I guess some of these folks somehow had their email encoded as PDF, which seems bonkers....
Some email programs did that, especially when there was special formatting involved. I seem to recall Thunderbird doing it in the past, as well as outlook.
Doesn't compute, please explain.
I guess the same way email can have html as an attachment for the same thing a plaintext does, evidently some of these mails suggested a mailer actually pdf encoded the email and attached, as well as the plain text.
So when someone replied with plaintext the base64 encoded PDF that they were replying to got 'quoted', meaning the unredacted email they were replying to is in there, just messy due to font confusion in the provided format.
Or did they just initially export the emails from Outlook as pdfs for the redaction process?
Ah, makes sense, thanks.