On Monday 22 April 2002 06:52 pm, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> No, my mail user agent counts as 'decent' by any criterion I care
> about, and does _not_ support attachments.  Be sure that I first of
> all tried using Celeste to send these things, but they vanished
> without trace. (

What mail client do you have that does not support MIME?

Celeste has been good the times I've used it (at least in 3.2); if you 
could give more information on this, we could probably diagnose the 
problem.

> Then it is time to fix the archiving tools.
> There are freely available versions of uudecode, and it's not
> _that_ hard a format to support.

uudecode is an increasingly obsolete format, and support in newer mail 
clients is less certain. For instance, in Kmail I have to run 
uuencoded messages through an external process to decode them, while 
MIME attachments are handled very well.

UUencode also has a number of problems, and is more sensitive to 
damage from non-ASCII mail gateways than MIME. And detecting actual 
attachments is a bit tricky.

For more discussion on the various problems with the uuencode (non) 
standard, see the MIME FAQ section 2.3:
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/mail/mime-faq/part2.html

For instance, how can we tell that lines that look like uudecode 
headers, like this:

begin 644 Comments-raok.1.cs
MMM is this an attachment or not?
end

are actually not?

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE