I'm a big fan of nuking uuencoding, because it isn't really standard --
different implementations are weirdly incompatible, and most versions
don't work in a pipe. I implemented all 3 of the new encodings in a
total of about an hour and a half, though, so I'm confident that such
tools can become quite widespread. (I might even be able to give them
away, but there are legal issue involved.)
As far as compression goes, I would like to see a Content-type:
compressed-message, indicating that the body is an 822 message
compressed. Doing it this way allows the compressed message to be of
another arbitrary content-type, e.g. audio. The only reason the RFC
doesn't currently define one is that I don't know enough to do so. If
you or someone else can find a good reference on a standard compression
algorithm (LZW?) we could make it a predefined content-type in this RFC.
Wanna give it a shot?