Subject: Mime attachment and uuencoding

From: James Dryfoos- Postmaster <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 13:09:52 -0500 (EST)

Why wont Pine auto decode a uuencoded attachment when saving it to disk?
The header looks like:

--Boundary (ID BioQk0Pg0/wm8LAbV4hLbA)
Content-type: APPLICATION/OCTET-STREAM
Content-description: shuttle6.gif 12/7/93 4:02P
Content-transfer-encoding: X-UUENCODE

begin 0 file
M1TE&.#=A903_`O<``%U^J____]X=!.[16QX>'I_&X8JC$,=E73QH.?C;M>"F
MGC*3W\K#-V<J#*L_,*ZGB.)_#1*!A[_8\(&BR42S.N(U1_"`5<N,QF5(8.;L

. . .

  -- Jim

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1993 11:11:19 -0800 (PST)

Jim,

X-UUENCODE is a private extension to the MIME specification that we are 
not currently supporting.  We will be implementing mailcap support in 
Pine in the near future, but it is unclear if even that will provide 
access to private encoding methods, like X-UUENCODE.

Thanks for the report!

--DLM

|\ |  |\/|  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

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1993 11:10:05 -0800 (PST)

Jim,
As you noticed, Pine's only *internal* attachment support is for MIME 
encoding.  That's not likely to change, but an upcoming version of
Pine will have a "pipe to Unix command" command, so handling uuencoded
attachments will then be much more convenient.

The X-UUENCODE C.T.E. used by whatever mailer sent this msg is actually a
very bad idea; it would be better to make the uuencode case look like a 
regular 822 non-MIME message rather than to "mix metaphors" like this. 
(See comp.mail.mime for an interminable debate on this subject.)

-teg

---

From: Philip Hazel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1993 09:41:03 +0000 (GMT)

> attachments will then be much more convenient.

This comment has prompted me to propose yet another item for your wish 
list. Sorry!

One of the Unix machines we run Pine on is a "mail only" machine. Users who
log in to it are put into a custom-built menu system which allows them only
certain functions. One of the functions is to run Pine. They are *not*
allowed to run a regular shell.

As most of these users are undergraduates, we can't trust them not to push 
at the restrictions, and we have found it necessary to patch Pine in order 
to inhibit those functions that would let them escape into a normal shell.
At present, the patch is pretty simple. It just causes Pine to ignore 
certain settings in the user's .pinerc file. These are:

editor, image-viewer, printer, personal-print-command, and (for good
measure) standard-printer.

Without this inhibition, users can use these features to cause normal
shells to be run.

If you implement a "pipe to Unix command" command, then we will have to 
patch that one out as well.

What would be very nice would be a compile time option on Pine that cuts 
out all features that could enable the user to escape into another program.

Regards,
Philip

--
Philip Hazel                   University Computing Service,
[email-masked]             New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
[email-masked]          England.  Phone: +44 223 334714

---

From: Dan Schlitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1993 08:46:18 -0500 (EST)

A compile time option to disable possible escapes to a shell sounds like a
very good idea.  It will encourage a design that makes it easy to disable
them and it will help make sure they are really disabled.

/dan

Dan Schlitt                           School of Engineering Computer Systems
[email-masked]        City College of New York
(212)650-6760                         New York, NY 10031

---

From: Paul Ribeiro <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1993 09:15:45 -0500 (EST)

> out all features that could enable the user to escape into another program.

Two other compile time options I would like to see are for news and update
support. - the first I'd exclude to cut the size of the binary, the second
I'd cut to save our link :-)
/P