Subject: re: attachments

From: John Stumbles <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 21:14:02 BST

On Wed, 13 Apr 1994 08:46:42 -0700 (PDT) Michael Showers wrote:

> I do not understand how attachments work in Pine.  Could someone help me 
> answer this question from one of our end-users?

Me neither - I have 2 requests:

1:	that Pine tell the user what the name of the encoding method for 
attachments is, so that the user can tell the would-be recipient (not using 
pine) how it is encoded. I'm not a completely dumb user (no arguments please 
;-) and I don't know off the top of my head, and when someone who knows more 
than I do asks, I feel a bit foolish saying I don't know!

BTW what IS the encoding method...?

2:	when a message is received with an attachment, pine asks if you want to 
save/view part 1 or 2 ... now I've been here before and know that part 1 is the 
plain text mail message you get to read anyway as soon as you go into the 
message, and there's already a command to save or export it, so what is the 
point of this - the part you want to save or view is always part 2 (or > 2 if 
there is >1 attachment), so why not have part 1 == 1st attachment ... etc ?

PS thanks for a nice mailer, and please don't keep us hanging on for that 
threaded/winsock version folks! B-)

John Stumbles                                       [email-masked]
University of Reading                                              0734 318435
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK
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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 14:05:56 -0700 (PDT)

John,

The encoding method used for all attachments in Pine is called BASE64, but
most of the decoding software available for BASE64 can already figure that
out from the MIME headers... 

Pine and some other mailers use the _convention_ that the first part of a
multipart message is the text body, There is nothing in the MIME
specification that requires that convention, and there are mailers available
that do not use it.  There has been some discussion in the comp.mail.mime
newsgroup about ways to distinguish between attachments and message body
parts in MIME, but I don't think anything has been decided. 

Thanks for the request!

--DLM

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 14:44:58 -0700 (PDT)

> BTW what IS the encoding method...?

John et al, 
It is both necessary and sufficient to have a "MIME capable" mailer or 
external software to read Pine attachments.  So it should be enough to 
say to your correspondents "You need MIME capability".  

For the terminally curious, Pine uses MIME's "Base64" Content-Transfer- 
Encoding for all attachments.
 
> there is >1 attachment), so why not have part 1 == 1st attachment ... etc ?

The attachment interface *is* due for an overhaul, but being removing 
the ability to specify the first MIME body part is not such a good idea,
for two reasons:

1. Using the attachment viewer's save option is currently the only way to 
   save a message without any headers.

2. Other mailers may generate "first" body parts that are not ascii text.
   In this case, it is important to be able to explicitly specify #1.

Still, we all agree that the current attachment interface is a bit clunky.
 
> threaded/winsock version folks! B-)

Yes, sir!  Right away!

-teg