On Sat, 27 Jan 2001 02:08:08 -0500 (EST), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Howard Eisenberger) wrote:
> Nothing wrong with NetMail, but as far as I know, MIME is handled
> by the mailreader, not the mailer. In this case, OLIM calls the
> external program pointed to by the "mencoder" line in olim.rc to
> encode the attachment and insert the MIME headers. NetMail just
> sends the resulting text message.
Yes, you are technically correct on all these points.
> I also believe it is the Content-Type that Howard S. is asking
> about. Running mpack or muencode -a from the command line, I
> get something like this.
> --==_MUencode_2001-Jan-26_20:37:35
> Content-Type: image/gif; name="get_even.gif" <====
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
> Content-Disposition: inline; filename="get_even.gif"
> Since I hardly ever use MIME in practice, I haven't tried to get
> this to work with different mailreaders. As has been pointed out,
> Arachne does it "right", although I'm not even sure why image/gif
> is "right" and application/octet-stream is "wrong", since I can
> decode the attachment in either case.
This is also another good point. You can easily decode an attachment
even if the headers misidentify the file type that is encoded. Some
people get upset about encoders that don't correctly identify the file
type. To please these folks we should try to do it right. We have to
cross all our Ts and dot all of our I's to keep all the constables from
getting after us. It is true that Arachne does it right.
Sam Heywood
