this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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Long story short:
Source: I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
π«‘
Godspeed friend
Curious here, this is base 64? And what's behind it is more often than not an image or text? And you need to do ocr to get the characters?
Maybe for the text it could use a dictionary to rubber stamp whether that zero is actually a letter oh, etc etc?
I'm curious to know what the challenge is and what your approach is.
Yes, it's base64. And what's behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.
In this case, it's a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.
The challenge is basically twofold:
As for my approach, I'm basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.
Ah yes pdf is a clusterfuck where anything is valid I think, so minimal redundancy.
Text and image formats are way more lenient and are full of redundancies.
Are you having as much trouble with OCR as the article author? I would have thought OCR was a solved problem in 2026 even with poor font selection.
I'm not having trouble with it as such, it's just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it's ridiculously time-consuming.
I wonder if they gave considered crowdsourcing this, having many people type in small chunks of the data by hand, doing their own character recognition? Get enough people in and enough overlap and the process would have some built-in error correction.
I mean the problem is that even with human eyes it's still really hard to tell l and 1 in that font.
See image
Not an expert at all but Iβm genuinely curious how long it would take to check all possibilities for each I or 1? Is that the full length of the hash or whatever? So in this example image we have 2^8 =256 different possibilities to check? Seems like that would be easy enough for a computer.
Edit: actually read the article. Itβs much more complicated than this. This isnβt really the only issue and the base64 in the example was 76 pages long.