Subject: about octet-stream

From: Sam Liddicott <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 10:08:14 +0100 (BST)

I find it confusing that in sending a binary (say /bin/echo) to myself,
pine encodes it as Application/octet-stream; yet when I get the message, 
it claims to know nothing about such a format!!! - I can't decode it!

Please, also, could some dear pine user send me a copy of their mailcap file.

Thanks indeedy.

+------------------------
| [email-masked]               Tho' I may like green eggs and ham   |
|                                       you may NOT call me Sam-I-Am       |
| Campbell Scientific Ltd                                                  |
                                              -----------------------------+

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 16:40:50 -0700 (PDT)

Sam,
Decoding is not the problem... Pine can decode anything it encodes (or
presumably any Base-64 MIME message): Just use the Save command in
the View Attachment screen.

But decoding is different than *displaying* (or in the case of an
executable being sent, "automatically invoking").  Pine does not have any
idea how to *display* an application/octet-stream object, and most
mailcaps don't define that type since it is a catch-all, and as such the
type doesn't convey anything about what should be done with it.

So there are a couple of distinct pieces to MIME: one is robust transport
of non-ascii data, which is handled by the encoding, and the other is
labelling data so that the recipient can (sometimes) automate the handling
of the data object, e.g. starting up "xv" to display a GIF file.  You
should always be able to Save an attachment and get the same byte stream
the originator sent, but if the attachment is not specifically labelled
(and the current version of Pine is very limited in its labelling ability)
then you'll have to save the attachment and manually invoke the
appropriate viewer.  In the case of an executable object, it's often a
good idea to make the invocation manual anyway...

-teg