Subject: Reading MIME Attachments Outside of Pine?

From: [email-masked] (J. Scott Williams)
Date: 9 Oct 1996 14:50:26 -0700

Some of our users receive MIME encoded email sent to non-mime
enabled email readers.  How can I process the MIME encoded
portion of the email outside of Pine?  Or, how can I forward the
email to a Pine email reader so that the MIME portion will
be seen as a legitimate MIME attachment?

Thanks for any help or pointers.

-jscott-
-- 
|J. Scott Williams, BH 313     Ph: (360) 650-2868  FAX: (360) 650-7323 |
|Admin. Computing Services     Internet:  [email-masked]             |
|Western Washington Univ.      "Internet--Talking across the electronic|
|Bellingham, WA  98225-9061               back fence of the world."-JSW|

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From: "Alan J. Flavell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 22:58:17 GMT

On 9 Oct 1996, J. Scott Williams wrote:

> portion of the email outside of Pine?

mpack/munpack , from all good software mirrors.

>  Or, how can I forward the

In general you can't, because a non-mime-aware mail client will mangle
the headers.

However, if the mail server itself doesn't mangle the headers (internet
mailers normally don't, but if you are behind an X400 gateway or
something then all bets are off), then you just want to leave your
non-compliant mail client out of the game and connect up to the mail
server with a MIME compliant one instead.  Remember, PINE likes IMAP but
it can also play POP.  Those are the Internet standard dialogs between
a mail client (user agent) and a mail server.

When you play POP, you may need to move the offending item back into
your incoming mail folder if it has already been processed and moved
into some other folder.  POP normally only accesses the incoming mail
folder, whereas IMAP can access any mail folder.

Try to keep a clear distinction between the mail server (MTA in the
jargon) and the mail client app.  Many PINE users get confused about
this because they execute PINE on the same host where the server runs,
and they imagine the whole thing (including .forward, and vacation,
and all that stuff) somehow happens inside PINE itself.  Not so.

QUite a few of my users still run VMS MAIL under VMS.  When they get
a MIME mail they tend to rush to me for assistance, and are quite
surprised when I execute PINE on another system and connect it to
their VMS system's mail server to retrieve their mail item.  It's
chiefly a matter of developing the right mental model of what's
going on.  I do my best to explain it to them, but mostly they are
so convinced that the mailing system is all one humungous whole that
then can't see the wood for the trees.  (PINE, geddit?  ;-)