Subject: Re: Command line mailing?

From: [email-masked] (Ken Hardy)
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 93 13:51:01 CST

Perhaps the best way to handle the "creeping featurism" issue in Pine
is to adopt the unix ideal of small tools working together, especially
where the command-line is at issue.  A small tool to pull RFC822
addresses from the address book could work like this (with /bin/sh):

	mail -s "_subject_" `pineaddr _nickname_` <_message_

Another utility might be written to MIME-encode attachments:

	mimify _message_  _file1_  _file2_ | mail -s "_subject_" _addr_

or, if MIME  requires those MIME-specific headers in the message
(haven't paid that much attention):

	mimify -s "_subject_" -a "_addr_list_"  _message_  _file1_  _file2_

where "mimify" would create the necessary headers & encapsulations and
pipe it off to sendmail (or MTA of choice); not too sophisticated a
task.  It could borrow existing code from Pine, but not be a part of a
monolithic do-all, be-all.  (Of course, "`pineaddr _user_`" could be used
instead of "_addr_" and "_addr_list_" in the preceeding examples.)

Remember that Pine is most notable for its user interface; we have
technically-sophisticated users abandoning mailtool & xmail in favor of
it, and not because of MIME.  These command-line issues really are not
at all related to Pine as a user interface.  Stand-alone, simplish
command-line utilities are best for command-line usage.  The majority
of Pine users will never need something like this, so why burden Pine
with it (and introduce new bugs with the effort)?  The "pineaddr" and
"mimify" utilities could be included in the Pine distribution, if the
UW guys decide they want to support it.  But it really doesn't need to
have anything to do with Pine proper.

--
Ken Hardy
[email-masked]  (racerx!ken) --__-_____--__-__--_--__-___-__-__-___----

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1993 13:16:30 -0800 (PST)

If someone would like to contribute these utilities, we would be happy to 
include them in the contrib directory of the source distribution.

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA