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Subject:Attachments From:dski -at- CAMEONET -dot- CAMEO -dot- COM -dot- TW Date:Thu, 27 Feb 1997 15:15:16 +0800
Charlie Kyle (ckyle%EIS_International -at- MCIMAIL -dot- COM) wrote --
> Could someone provide some information about ftp and mail attachments
> especially as it pertains to this List and other lists. I use MS Mail /
> Win95. I see attachments in Lists as gobbledygook text. Any and all
> suggestions appreciated.
Someone said there's no standard. There is. It's called MIME, and many
mailers and browsers support it, but it has to be used right. This mainly
involves proper identification of the attachment in the header. I once
received a Base64-format attachment that Unix Pine could not decode; I
saved the `gobbledygook' to a file, got a DOS utility for Base64, and
decoded it with a few keystrokes. The next Base64 attachment I got,
however, Pine decoded in a flash. The difference was in the message
header or the attachment header or both. (And if I'd known that the first
time, I wouldn't have had to comb the 'net for a decoder; I could have
manually used the Unix utility that Pine called the second time.)
List processors, quite rightly, are not set up to recognize attachments
in incoming messages. The list processor adds its own header before
retransmitting the message, and since the header doesn't mention the
attachment, the attachment becomes part of the body, and you see it in
all its seven-bit mailable glory (it really is a thing of beauty). Wanna
save it to a file and decode it from the command line? Easy as pie. While
you're doing that, a dozen or more people will be flaming the sender....
Dan Strychalski
dski -at- cameonet -dot- cameo -dot- com -dot- tw
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