Subject: Re: Attachment file types

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 17:09:47 -0800 (PST)

On Mon, 15 Mar 1993, Mike Scheuerman wrote:

> We've been testing the file attachment piece of pine and are having some
> difficulty in understanding why some files are tagged as
> 'APPLICATION/octet-stream'.  We attempted to attach signature file which is
> a plain ASCII text file and for some reason Pine thought it was an
> application file.  Are there known problems in this area or are we doing
> something wrong?

Mike,
The answer is "known problems".

A similar question came our way recently, so I'll just repeat that exchange...

> P.S.  pine can't seem to display attached text files.  Is this
> normal for this version (3.05)?

Alas, normal for 3.05, but it will be fixed in the next release.
MIME is pretty new, and the mechanism for indicating whether a body part is an
attachment or an in-line inclusion is only now getting sorted out.  We used an
application datatype rather than a text datatype for attached text files in
order to help distinguish the two cases, but it is clear now that the attached
text files should be typed TEXT/PLAIN, in which case they will be displayable.

A few other MIME encoding problems will also be fixed in the next release.

-teg

---

From: [email-masked] (Mike Scheuerman)
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 17:05:33 -0800 (PST)

The file we were attempting to attach as a test is below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Scheuerman                      email:          mikes@cmsicor1
CMSI Incorporated                       Voice Phone     503/227-0600
0234 SW Bancroft                        Fax Phone       503/222-5238
Portland, OR  97201
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are the dashes a problem?

Thanks for the input.

Mike Scheuerman
[email-masked]