Subject: Re: Reading uuencoded attachments

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 16:47:05 -0700 (PDT)

Brad,
That message would appear to be a futile and doomed attempt to merge
uuencode and MIME technology.  The MIME spec defines several
Content-Transfer-Encodings, but X-UUENCODE (or even UUENCODE) is not one
of them, and I'm pretty sure it never will be.  (I believe there is an
appendix in the MIME spec that explains why Base-64 encoding was chosen
over uuencode, by the way.) 

People who are sending MIME attachments with MIME headers should use MIME
(B64 or QP) encoding!!!  If backwards compatibility with uuencode is
needed, I'd recommend sending a conventional uuencoded message, without
trying to pretend it is a valid MIME CTE.

Do you know what mailer is attempting to perpetrate this evil?

-teg

On 27 Jun 1996, Brad  Garcia wrote:

> Not sure if this is pine specific or a mime/mailcap problem, but if
> someone can help me I sure would appreciate it.
> 
> I have a message with a uuencoded text file as an attachment.
> How can I read it?  I'm using pine 3.94.
> 
> I've tried setting display-filters to run uudecode, but that didn't help.
> (maybe I have the trigger wrong?).
> 
> I've tried creating a mailcap entry (I've just started learning, so I
> may not have gotten it correct).
> 
> Pine complains:
> 
>     Don't know how to unpack "X-UUENCODE" encoding
> 
> 
> Pine gives the following details about the attachment:
> 
>                 Type            : Text
>                 Subtype         : PLAIN
>                 Encoding        : X-UUENCODE
>                 Parameters      : NAME = SWHWOU~2.TXT
>                                   X-MAC-TYPE = 54455854
>                                   X-MAC-CREATOR = 74747874
>                 Approx. Size    : 1,975 bytes
>                 Display Method  : Can't, Unknown Encoding
> 
> Yes, I can save it to a file and run uudecode, but I'm hoping for a 
> better solution.
> 
> -- 
> Brad Garcia
>

---

From: "Brad M. Garcia" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 06:56:38 -0400 (EDT)

> Do you know what mailer is attempting to perpetrate this evil?

Oh yes.  Eudora 2.1.1 for Windows.
What's even worse was that it was originally attempting to mail the
file by BINHEXing it first!!!!

It's a stupid little text file!  Why does it feel the need to do
*anything* to it?!

Brad Garcia

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 08:02:46 -0700 (PDT)

Brad,
There are reasons to encode text files... Pine does it too.  (The problem
is that the Internet mail infrastructure is not completely 7bit clean,
much less 8bit clean, so even ascii text files can be corrupted.)

But I think that promulgating this "X-UUENCODE" CTE is pretty egregious.
(As is using binhex --though I thought that was configurable in Eudora.)

-teg

---

From: [email-masked] (Jie Yuan)
Date: 2 Jul 1996 19:52:34 GMT

>It's a stupid little text file!  Why does it feel the need to do

It is the Eudora user's fault.  He/she must have configured Eudora
improperly.  When I attach a text file, in Eudora 1.5.x, the text is 
not encoded, and I had no trouble reading it in Pine as attachment.

A likely cause of Eudora's misbehavior may be the filename extention.
I normally name my text files xxx.txt.  If you name it xxx.doc, it is 
very likely for Eudora to do the wrong things.

Jie
-- Jie Yuan, PhD - U. Cincinnati - Pharmacology & C.B. --
== POBox 670575, Cin., OH 45267-0575  =  513-558-2352  ==
== [email-masked] = www.uc.edu/~yuanj =  using Knews  ==
== finger -l [email-masked] for my PGP pub. key=

---

From: "J. Kelly Cunningham" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 09:40:52 -0600

On 2 Jul 1996, Brad M. Garcia wrote:

bmg> On Mon, 1 Jul 1996, Terry Gray wrote:
bmg> 
bmg> > Do you know what mailer is attempting to perpetrate this evil?
bmg> 
bmg> Oh yes.  Eudora 2.1.1 for Windows.
bmg> What's even worse was that it was originally attempting to mail the
bmg> file by BINHEXing it first!!!!
bmg> 
bmg> It's a stupid little text file!  Why does it feel the need to do
bmg> *anything* to it?!
bmg> 
bmg> Brad Garcia
bmg> 

Try piping the message to this script (uuread):

#!/bin/csh -f
cd ~ ; sed "s/begin\ [1-7][1-7][1-7]/begin\ 600/g" > UU.tmp
set fileName = `grep ^begin\ 600 < UU.tmp | awk '{print $3}'`
uudecode UU.tmp ; rm UU.tmp ; cat $fileName ; rm $fileName

It will write and delete two tmp files in your home directory (UU.tmp and
encoded file name).

-- kc    finger [email-masked] | pgp -fka    49860926614586AF
"The  strongest reason for the people to retain  their    54105BA338FBF0FB
right  to  keep  and  bear  arms is, as a last resort,
to protect themselves against tyranny in  government." -- Thomas Jefferson