Subject: Re: No MIME

From: John Gardiner Myers <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 1995 11:52:47 -0400

"Lee M. Latham" <[email-masked]> writes:
> [...] and I don't reckon I can ask every user in Russia to 
> use a MIME unencoder to read my posts! ;)

Why not?  One is readily available.

Mpack and munpack are utilities for encoding and decoding
(respectively) binary files in MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions) format mail messages.  For compatibility with older forms
of transferring binary files, the munpack program can also decode
messages in split-uuencoded format.  The Macintosh version can also
decode messages in split-BinHex format.

In short, munpack is the MIME equivalent of uudecode/binhex.

Versions are included for unix, pc, os2, mac, amiga and archimedes
systems.  The canonical FTP site for this software is
ftp.andrew.cmu.edu:pub/mpack/

All official distributions of mpack 1.5 are PGP signed by
John Gardiner Myers <[email-masked]>

---

From: "Lee M. Latham" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 03:48:19 -0500

could someone please tell me if there is a way to NOT mime-encode an 
attachment sent with PINE?  I am trying to communicate using 8th bit 
ASCII in the Relcom (Russian) newsgroups, but they can't read my 8th bit 
attachements because they are MIME encoded, and apparently that is not 
standard there yet, and I don't reckon I can ask every user in Russia to 
use a MIME unencoder to read my posts! ;) HELP!

thanks
Lee

---

From: [email-masked] (Arthur Teschler)
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 17:18:29 GMT

On Sun,  9 Apr 1995 11:52:47 -0400 John Gardiner Myers ([email-masked]) wrote:
: "Lee M. Latham" <[email-masked]> writes:
: > [...] and I don't reckon I can ask every user in Russia to 
: > use a MIME unencoder to read my posts! ;)

: Why not?  One is readily available.

But why?

If the 8th bit is delivered correct and not cut off by some stupid gateways,
there is no need to put an ordinary ISO-8859-X text into 'quoted-printable'.
I'd like to turn that off, too.

I can see the use of m[un]pack when sending pics, sound-files or similar,
but an ordinary letter containing Umlauts should not end up in a rather
unreadable thing with = made into =3D, end-of-lines looking like =20, lines
broken up at different positions than I intended or other ugly things.

Pine has a lot of nice features, but I would like to decide when to use
them myself. At least I would like to be warned that the message going off
is in a format my counterpart may not be able to read.

--
[email-masked]

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 09:53:25 -0700 (PDT)

On Mon, 10 Apr 1995, Arthur Teschler wrote:

> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 17:18:29 GMT
> From: Arthur Teschler <[email-masked]>
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: No MIME
> 

The next release of Pine will be able to negotiate 8bit c-t-e for text if
your MTA understands ESMTP 8BITMIME. 

|\ |  |\/|  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

---

From: Marko Hotti <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 1995 15:40:53 +0300 (EDT)

> I'd like to turn that off, too.

Same here. MIME Quoted-Printable causes lots of problems here in Finland, 
too. Pine is an excellent and versatile program but has caused lots of 
irritation here because of the =E4 etc. characters that get in the messages.
8bit characters are handled properly but QP is not.

> broken up at different positions than I intended or other ugly things.

I share this opinion. The most serious computing professionals don't like
Pine at all because it just can't handle our special letters (äöåß etc) 
in a way that is compatible with rest of our software.

-Marko-

M a r k o   H o t t i	  E-Mail : [email-masked]
University of Oulu        WWW URL: http://phoenix.oulu.fi/~mhotti/
Faculty of Medicine       SMail  : Tervontie 4 C 11, FIN-90230  OULU
______________________________________________________________________________
-Matrimony isn't a word, it's a sentence.

---

From: [email-masked] (Ulrich Windl)
Date: 19 Apr 1995 07:27:59 GMT

In an elder PINE you could use charset = ASCII, and PINE would not touch the
8-bit characters. Only if you use ISO Latin-1 Pine converts characters.

(Non-official answer)
--
Ulrich Windl <[email-masked]>
Klinikum der Universitaet Regensburg, Rechenzentrum DV-med
Franz-Josef-Strauss-Allee 11
D-93042 Regensburg, Germany
%%[PGP 2.3a/2.6ui Public Key 0x[e8]43660d on at least one key server]%%

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 1995 19:37:11 -0700 (PDT)

> 8-bit characters. Only if you use ISO Latin-1 Pine converts characters.

Official answer:

Pine is based on, and tries hard to adhere to, Internet mail standards.
Current Internet mail standards do not permit sending unencoded 8bit 
characters except when an 8bit connection has been negotiated via ESMTP.

Unfortunately, not eveyone agrees with the current Internet standards.  There
are areas in the world where it is considered acceptable to violate the
standards and "just send 8" even without a negotiated 8bit connection. 
Regrettably, a few have even created "outlaw" versions of Pine that violate
the standard, but no official version of Pine has ever done so.  (At 
least not intentionally.)

Version 3.92 will support negotiated 8bit connections via ESMTP's 
8BITMIME construct.

-teg

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: 21 Apr 1995 22:35:56 GMT

Marko Hotti ([email-masked]) wrote:

: On Mon, 10 Apr 1995, Arthur Teschler wrote:

: > If the 8th bit is delivered correct and not cut off by some stupid gatewa=
: ys,
: > there is no need to put an ordinary ISO-8859-X text into 'quoted-printabl=
: e'.
: > I'd like to turn that off, too.

: Same here. MIME Quoted-Printable causes lots of problems here in Finland,=
: =20
: too. Pine is an excellent and versatile program but has caused lots of=20
: irritation here because of the =3DE4 etc. characters that get in the messag=
: es.
: 8bit characters are handled properly but QP is not.

: > I can see the use of m[un]pack when sending pics, sound-files or similar,
: > but an ordinary letter containing Umlauts should not end up in a rather
: > unreadable thing with =3D made into =3D3D, end-of-lines looking like =3D2=
: 0, lines
: > broken up at different positions than I intended or other ugly things.

: I share this opinion. The most serious computing professionals don't like
: Pine at all because it just can't handle our special letters (=E4=F6=E5=DF =
: etc)=20
: in a way that is compatible with rest of our software.

Ditto.  This may be the single most annoying feature of pine.  I think
the number one item on my wish list for all data transfer software is the
"leave my data alone!" option.  Something that tells the program not to 
act so smart and to let me decide how I want to transfer the data when I
want.  These Q-P codes are causing no end to consternation on many listservs. 
First you have to tell people that their mail is getting converted, which they
find hard to accept, and then they blame the receiver.  Finally they accept 
that their wonderful Pine is the source.  And then we have to figure out
what causes it!  Please fix this in 3.92! I have, BTW, seen a patch for this 
on the Pine Web page (really FTP) 
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/docs/tech-notes.txt but I can't install
it so I don't know how good it is.
I've incidentally had trouble forcing our 3.91 Unix pine at ASU to do it,
which makes actually figuring out how others can avoid it tough.
Aren't ^N, ^O, and ESC supposed to force it to use Q-P?  Or is it only
8-bit chars or what?  The documentation isn't particularly clear about it.

Ben B.
buckner<at>enuxsa.eas.asu.edu
And people wonder why I still use elm.