New message encoding #840
Description
I propose a new message encoding (in addition to IGNORE, TRIVIAL and SIMPLE). It would be able to contain more elaborate objects. My proposal is a structure that is compressed (e.g. using zlib) and when decompressed will contain a lightweight system for the content of the message, for example bencode or msgpack. This will allow to have email-like headers and multiple elements in the body, including picture and attachments. The current situation with base64 encoded img tags is clumsy.
I the reason for doing it like this (lightweight plus compression) instead of existing message standards like MIME, or general data standards like XML or json is to save bandwidth. MIME is also confusing an has too much overhead. A standard like msgpack/bencode can easily be converted to/from json or XML, and stored using something else than sqlite, for example a nosql store.
For conversions to/from emails (i.e. MIME), a gateway can deal with that (and I intend to implement it in https://github.com/PeterSurda/bitmessage-email-gateway).