Subject: Re: MIME

From: [email-masked] (Maren S. Leizaola)
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 01:17:36 +0800

Dave,
 This is a most excellent question. To my knowledge PC Pine
will not handle UUENCODING type attachments.... full stop. Not
even our Internet Exchange should be able to do this recursive
decoding of attachments using different encoding methods.

 When the IETF (MIME WG)  where "argueing" it out about
 permitting that UUENCODE was a MIME .
 It was outright rejected on the grounds that MIME was the new way to 
go and everyone should ditch their UUENCODING method and should
go to MIME. Unfortunately this was very short sited and it did not happen.
As every single UNIX box on the Internet box on the net has UUENCODE
tools and very very few MIME tools, plus there is a tonne of cruddy
gateways or clients that only do UUENCODING.

Hence this is not a supported mime time. The message sent to you
is firstly defined as a 7 bit MIME encoding (no encoding actually)
encapsulating  a UUENCODED file which is actually containting
and 7 or 8 bit file, most likely 8.

The person that sent you this did exactly what the guys designing
MIME did not agree to. :)

Regards,
Maren.
[email-masked]

PS. To the guys developing Pine and IMAP. I love Pine and PC-Pine...
 I wish I could use the IMAP over long distance or low bandwidth 
connections but it stalls too much. 

P.P.S.  It would be good if instead of adding more bells and whistles
to Pine that you focus on reducing its memory consumption. 
I think that would win you a International Hero status on the Internet.

Do you guys have shares in the semiconductors 
(RAM) industry NEC/Motorola/Ti ? :)

P.P.P.S. Is Cyrus IMAP also RAM guzzling IMAP implentation?

---------------------

Hello:  I get emails that have attached files that are encoded.  The
encoding looks like this:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-------------

begin 644 rtriso01.doc
MT,/1X*&Q&N$'''''''''''''
etc etc etc

Does anyone know how to easily decode such an attachment with Pine?

thanks,
Dave Katz
[email-masked]

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 09:26:34 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

> connections but it stalls too much. 

Maren, if you'd separately send me some more info on your experiences, I'd
be grateful.  (e.g. "stalls" = gets slow, or breaks connection, or ...)
My experience over slow, high-latency links has been a bit better, but
there is still room for tuning.

> I think that would win you a International Hero status on the Internet.

Most of the memory use issue concerns the c-client driver for the
particular mailbox format you use.  In the past, the mailbox driver for
the defacto std Unix mailbox format read everything into virtual memory.
On some systems this is good, on other systems it is bad.  Sometimes very
bad.  So now in the latest toolkit there is a driver that uses a temp file
for this format instead.  I think you can get an imapd with this driver in
the imap.tar.Z distribution on ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail

Another alternative is to use a different mailbox format, as Cyrus does,
such as "mbx".  But this implies that all access will be via IMAP or POP.

> (RAM) industry NEC/Motorola/Ti ? :)

If so, the strategy isn't working, 'cause I aint rich :)

> P.P.P.S. Is Cyrus IMAP also RAM guzzling IMAP implentation?

See above.

-teg