Subject: uudecode problem with Pine mails

From: [email-masked] (Man Lap)
Date: 14 Jun 95 08:02:38 GMT

Hi,

My friend zipped and uuencoded a binary file and sent to me by attach it to
his mail.

But, when I try to uudecode it,"no begin line" appeared. I found that
there is really not begin line in the file. Why this happened? Can I
decode the file in another way.

FYI, my friend is using Pine and I am using mh.

Thanks in advance.

Lap

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From: Don Sugarman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 11:07:10 -0400 (EDT)

On 14 Jun 1995, Man Lap wrote:

> there is really not begin line in the file. Why this happened? 

I think it is because the 'begin 644 <filename>' was MIMEd along with the 
rest of the file when he attached it. 

> Can I

I assume mh doesn't use MIME, or you would have been able to save the 
MIMEd attachment and uudecoded that.

Your friend MIMEd the uuencoded file by attaching it.  He should have 
read the file into the message body (ctrl-R in Pine).

You have two choices, 1) have him resend the uuencoded file (easy) or 2) get 
munpack try to unMIME the attachment then uudecode that file (hard).

Good luck.

Don Sugarman
[email-masked]

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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 16:43:31 +0100 (BST)

> My friend zipped and uuencoded a binary file and sent to me by attach it to

ZIPping a file allows multiple files to be stoed as one, and compressed 
in the process.  The result is usually known as an "archive" and is a 
binary file.

Binary files don't travel the e-mail system well, so are first converted 
to text (increasing their size somewhat), which does travel well.

UUENCODE is just of many ways of converting a binary file to text.

When someone sends a file using the "Attachment" feature of Pine (or 
ECSmail, or...) the file is encoded using a system called "MIME" 
(actually "Base-64 encoding" is more accurate -- one part of the 
specification which makes up MIME).

Base-64 encoding does a similar job as UUENCODE: it teks an input file 
(be it text or binary) and converts it to a (human unreadable) textual 
file ready for traversing the e-mail networks.

Pine (and probably other mailers) *always* encode files sent as 
attachments.  They *sometimes* encode the main message body if it has a 
very high proportion of binary data.

> decode the file in another way.

What you have received is the MIME-encoded UUENCODE-d ZIP-ped file.

If your mailer was "MIME aware" (can understand MIME-encoded attachments) 
the first step of "de-MIME-ing" it would be automatically done for you.  
If your mailer is not MIME-aware you need to get hold of a separate 
program to do it (like UUDECODE converts UUENCODED files back).

Once you have unpacked your attachment from MIME format you'll then have 
the UUENCODED file, ready for feeding to your UUDECODE program.

So you'll EITHER need to:

*  Get hold of a program to unpack MIME files to work on the attachment 
   you have already been sent

or,

*  Ask your colleague to send the UUENCODEd file to you by including it 
   in the message body rather than as an attachment.  (This is done in 
   Pine by placing the cursor in the Message Text area and using the 
   Ctrl/R (Read File) command to insert a file.  Text files included in 
   this way are not MIME-encoded.)

As an aside it is usually to simply attach the binary document to your 
message rather than first UUENCODEing in -- MIME handles the binary to 
text conversion instead.  This, of course, assumes that the recipient has 
a MIME-aware mailer or set of unpacking tools!

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

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From: [email-masked] (Robert Owen Thomas)
Date: 14 Jun 1995 13:45:56 GMT

Man Lap ([email-masked]) wrote:
: But, when I try to uudecode it,"no begin line" appeared. I found that
: there is really not begin line in the file. Why this happened? Can I
: decode the file in another way.
this is simple to fix, fortunately.  vi the file from your friend.
add, as the TOP line:
begin 644 myfile.gz
then save the file.  you will now be able to uudecode the file.  the
output will be named "myfile.gz", mode 644.

hope this helps!

regards,
--robert
--
 o               Robert Owen Thomas -- Cymru Consulting, Inc.               o
 o  Unix:  Admin, Networking, Security, Internet, RDBMS, App Development    o
 o                e-mail:  [email-masked] or [email-masked]                 o 
 o       vox: 708.686.3600   fax: 708.686.3600 (it works, trust me)         o
 o        "When I die, I want to go sleeping like my grandfather...         o
 o              Not screaming like the passengers in his car!"              o

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From: Lap Man <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 15:13:11 +0900

Hi,

Thank you very much for your information.

Lap
16/6/95