🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris Bartram (<rcb@uii.com> or <RCB@SPSUP-1.NAVY.MIL>) writes
in article <000EEK@HUEY.UII.COM>:

>   It seems to me that we can at least come up with a case to handle uuencoded
> files within MIME - after all the purpose of MIME was to add the multi-media
> capabilities without "breaking" old-fashioned SMTP mailers.... With proper
> boundaries, a uuencoded enclosure can be recognized and handled by MIME
> mailers AND old-mailers that key on uuencoded headers.

The MIME specification explicitly rejects this idea:

:           However, it should be noted that the use of such conversions
:           [Unix compress and encrypt]
:           is  explicitly  discouraged due to a lack of portability and
:           standardization.   The  use  of  uuencode  is   particularly
:           discouraged,   in  favor  of  the  Content-Transfer-Encoding
:           mechanism, which is both more standardized and more portable
:           across mail boundaries.

(RFC 1341, section 7.4.1).

Note that uuencoding is discouraged, not prohibited.  Therefore
the general mechanism of RFC 1341 for including files in a
message body can be applied also to uuencoded files:

Use the header field

Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=foo.bar; type=uu;
 conversions=x-uuencode

If you want to attach a description of the file, it can be
included in a Content-Description: header field or you can
have it and the file as two different body parts in a
message with Content-Type: multipart/mixed.

--
Olle Jarnefors                     Internet: ojarnef@admin.kth.se
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