Subject: Attachments in Pine

From: Steven E Frazier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 14:58:02 -0500 (EST)

What type of attachments does Pine support?

Will it support a binary file?  If so, does pine actually do an uuencode on
the binary file?

Thanks.

-- 
Norstan Communications, Inc.        | Steven E. Frazier
8101 N. High Street Suite 100       |---------------------------------------
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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 12:08:38 -0800 (PST)

Pine will attach arbitrary format files.  It does so using the emerging
Internet standard for multi-part mail, MIME.

The actual encoding used is either BASE64 or QUOTED-PRINTABLE, depending upon
the characteristics of the data.  These encoding formats are much more
resilient to structural damage of the data.  uuencode, on the other hand, is
quite vulnerable to several syndromes of data damage.

MIME is supported in an increasing number of mailers.  Recently Microsoft
stated that it will be supporting MIME in its SMTP gateway, replacing RFC-1154
and uuencode.  Although uuencode is undoubtably more prevalent today, MIME can
be expected to rapidly overtake it.

Unfortunately, uuencode is not interoperable with BASE64, although they use
similar formats.  Fortunately, BASE64 decoders are trivial to write, and
Nathaniel Borenstein's metamail package includes a public-domain standalone
BASE64 decoder.

-- Mark --

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From: "David L. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 13:30:04 -0800 (PST)

> Will it support a binary file?  If so, does pine actually do an uuencode on

Pine does not use uuencode to encode binary files.  Instead, it uses what
is called Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding.  It performs the same function
as uuencode, but is not compatible.  According to RFC1341 (MIME), Base64
has the advantage of working with all versions of EBCDIC.  If you want to
write your own encoder/decoder, section 5.2 of the RFC should give you
enough info to whip one out...

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David L. Miller                       Internet: [email-masked]
Systems Programmer/Network Analyst      BITNET: MILLERD@WSUVM1
Washington State University Tri-Cities    UUCP: ...!yoda!dmiller
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