I'd gently suggest that the best thing to do is to immediately post
the freely distributable base64 encoding programs to alt.sources along
with a man page that explains why base64 is technically better than
uuencode and perhaps mentioning that base64 is likely to be part of
the future MIME specification. A posting to the relevant alt.binaries
groups mentioning the base64 source posting and noting its technical
superiority would magnify the impact in the group of concern.
If that were followed up by postings of the same thing to
comp.sources.misc or comp.sources.unix (which have longer pipeline
delays), then it would be likely to have some impact.
I don't think that trying to be persuasive would be likely to work
in a USENET context. A pity, but that seems to be the reality there.
The other thing would be to offer the base64 program source to Henry
Spencer for inclusion in the C News distribution. I think it should
not be pushed onto the news software community since there is a
separate IETF-sponsored group addressing that and especially since
Henry is writing a son-of-1036 draft that is directly addressing what
extensions are suitable in that context.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil