Subject: How do I control Content-Type of Mime attachment

From: daniel lance herrick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 09:10:19 -0500 (EST)

Following help from the main menu doesn't seem to
yield anything on the subject and hitting Get Help
with the cursor in the Attchmnt: field fetches
some useful, but somewhat less technical advice.

I attached a couple .jpg files and pine labeled
them

  Content-Type: APPLICATION/octet-stream

and then metamail did not know enough to feed them
to xv.

Does this mean my pine is using the wrong mailcap
file, or can I feed it a better mailcap file? Or
can I supply the Content-Type in the
Attchmnt: field when I'm composing a message?

(The pine man page has language that suggests I
can't get there from here.)

dan       [email-masked]
http://www.NationalReform.org/ - Explicitly Christian Politics
Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh, but in vain.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: bill hunter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 09:42:25 -0700 (MST)

On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, daniel lance herrick wrote:

> Following help from the main menu doesn't seem to yield anything on
> the subject and hitting Get Help with the cursor in the Attchmnt:
> field fetches some useful, but somewhat less technical advice.
>
> I attached a couple .jpg files and pine labeled them
>
> and then metamail did not know enough to feed them to xv.
>
> Does this mean my pine is using the wrong mailcap file, or can I feed
> it a better mailcap file? Or can I supply the Content-Type in the
> (The pine man page has language that suggests I can't get there from
> here.)

Dan,

I have had some bizarre image files that Solaris would identify as jpeg or
gif (when I type file imagename.jpg|gif), but that showed up as the
Octet-stream thing when attached in Pine, and usually xv cannot display
them;  I have to use a web browser. No idea what causes this...

Try a few other jpg's and see if this is the problem, or at least make
sure xv can slurp them first as a test.

I have not had to tweak .mailcap or .mime-types for this for a long time
(early 3.x releases I think).

All I do is in Setup/Config specify:

image-viewer=/bin/xv

When I attach a jpg file, send it to myself, and view the details of the
attachment, it looks like this:

Details about Attachment #2 :

           Type            : Image
           Subtype         : JPEG
           Encoding        : BASE64
           Parameters      : NAME = zoso.jpg
           Description     : "zoso"
           Disposition     : ATTACHMENT; FILENAME = zoso.jpg
           Approx. Size    : 1,174 bytes
           Display Method  : "/bin/xv <datafile>"

Hope this is of some help...

-bill (who is loving the new filter capability in 4.x!)

---

From: daniel lance herrick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 16:05:40 -0500 (EST)

After sending the question, I read the rest of the
man page and noticed the reference to
/etc/mime.types in the list of files. There isn't
any on these systems. A web search produced mime
types contents from some university's old help
desk pages and I copied them into ~/.mime.types

The attachment is the smallest jpeg file I could
find quickly (out of an old amaya
distribution) and should be listed as
Content-Type: image/jpeg
demonstrating that, again, pine does THE RIGHT
THING, this time using the standard configuration
instead of a magic builtin configuration.

Kudos to the pine team and thanks to the gentleman
who offered assistance.

dan