From dlm@shivafs.cac.washington.edu Wed Aug 24 09:26:18 1994
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 95 15:40:48 -0800
From: The Pine Development Team <pine-faq@docserver.cac.washington.edu>
Subject: Why does Pine encode text attachments?
Status: RO
X-Status: 


Pine uses MIME's Base64 encoding for *all* attachments, including text, in
order to assure that they are not modified in transit. The goal is make
sure that sending file attachments in Pine is as dependable as using FTP.

Although it may seem like encoding is unnecessary for files that are
plain text, certain email gateway, trasport, and delivery agents pose
a threat to the integrity of even text files (much less binary files).
For example, long lines may be wrapped, trailing spaces deleted, tabs
turned into spaces, lines beginning with "From " modified, etc.
Pmay there are actually several potential sources of corruption

From dlm@shivafs.cac.washington.edu Wed Aug 24 09:26:18 1994
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 95 15:40:48 -0800
From: The Pine Development Team <pine-faq@docserver.cac.washington.edu>
Subject: How can someone without Pine decipher an attachment?
Status: O
X-Status: 

   
Pine uses the MIME Internet standard for attaching files to email messages.
Any MIME-capable mailer should be able to understand Pine's attachments.

If you use Pine's attachment feature, your recipient needs to have either
a MIME-capable mail reader or software that can decode MIME. Fortunately,
these are not hard to find. The major proprietary mail vendors have
committed to MIME support, but some of their upgraded products are some
months away.  One freely-available program which can decipher a MIME
attachment is munpack from Carnegie Mellon. It is available at: 
   ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu//pub/mpack

From dlm@shivafs.cac.washington.edu Wed Aug 24 09:26:18 1994
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 95 15:40:48 -0800
From: The Pine Development Team <pine-faq@docserver.cac.washington.edu>
Subject: How can I send a text file without it being encoded?
Status: RO
X-Status: 


This is easily done by using Pine's "file inclusion" key (Control-R).
Instead of entering the file name on the Attchmnt header line, move
the cursor to the bottom of your messaage, and press Control-R, then
enter the name of the text file.  It will be included at the end of 
your message without any encoding (unless the file contains 8bit or
binary characters, in which case the entire message becomes subject
to MIME encoding rules.)

From dlm@shivafs.cac.washington.edu Wed Aug 24 09:26:18 1994
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 95 15:40:48 -0800
From: The Pine Development Team <pine-faq@docserver.cac.washington.edu>
Subject: Why does Pine use Base64 instead of UUENCODE?
Status: RO
X-Status: 


Pine uses the Internet MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
standard for all attachments.  MIME uses "Base64" encoding rather than
uuencode, because uuencode uses characters that are transformed by some
email gateways, and there are also several incompatible versions of
uuencode.  However, if needed, you can certainly uuencode a file outside
of Pine, then use the Composer's Ctrl-R (file inclusion) command to insert
the uuencoded file into the message. 

From dlm@shivafs.cac.washington.edu Tue Aug 15 17:06:28 1995
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 17:06:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: David L Miller <dlm@cac.washington.edu>
Subject: How do I convert a Sun Mailtool attachment to MIME format?
Status: RO
X-Status: 


Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> has written a Perl conversion script to
convert Mailtool to MIME.  The Perl script and C conversion are
available in

	ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.perl.Z
	ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.c.Z

The following is from

        ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.README

This is a simple filter that takes Sun OpenWindows 3 messages as input,
and produces MIME messages as output.  It's written in perl, so you
need perl installed to run it.

As shipped, the perl program may call uudecode to undo the effects of
uuencoded files, and uuencode to convert binary files to base64 (!).
It calls "zcat" to uncompress files.  Finally, it needs a program
to convert Sun raster files to some other format (like GIF) that
MIME supports.  As supplied, it uses the "convert" program
(part of ImageMagick) to do this, but some other program or set
of programs (like the pbm stuff: "rasttopnm | ppmtogif") will also
work.  Just change the line that calls "convert" to use whatever you
have.

If you are using MH 6.8 or later with MIME support, put this in
your .mhn-profile file (or wherever $MHN points):

mhn-show-x-sun-attachment/: sun-to-mime.perl | mhn -file - -show


If you are using metamail, put this in your .mailcap file:

x-sun-attachment; sun-to-mime.perl < %s | metamail -T ; needsterminal


Enjoy!

Keith Moore
moore@cs.utk.edu




