Chris Metzler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:20:41 -0400:
> Since the email will have attachments, that requires that the email be > MIME-encoded; all email messages with attachments are MIME-encoded. Note that while this is may be the only thing your client supports, there are attachment methods such as the older UUE (UUencoding) that don't require MIME. MIME is better as it's more precisely specified (UUE just sort of happened, and AFAIK there's no real standard for it, only mostly compatible implementations), but a general statement that "all email messages with attachments are MIME-encoded" would be incorrect. It may of course be correct within the context of your mail client only, such as this (added text in CAPS, parenthesis and xx indicates deletion, see below): Since the email will have attachments, WITH MY CLIENT that requires that the email be MIME(xx-encodedxx); all email messages FROM MY CLIENT with attachments are MIME(xx-encoded). The other thing is that MIME is way more than an encoding standard. Rather, MIME is a backward compatible message format specification standard which happens to include multiple encoding sub-specifications for use with non-plain-ansi-text when it must be sent over a 7-bit-ansi- text-only medium such as Internet mail message standard. The two of these originally described were MIME/quoted-printable, more desirable for content that's mostly plain-text, where reading of the raw encoded format may be necessary, and MIME/base64, more efficient at encoding arbitrary binary content. It is however possible to represent any content in either encoding, if necessary. (FWIW, it's possible to add other encoding specs such as yEnc to the MIME standard, and there was at least at one point an effort to do so with yEnc, but to my knowledge, the original two are the only ones that are accepted as official RFC standards, or even that are reasonably widely implemented. I don't know the current status, but last I knew the effort wasn't making a lot of progress, in part because the original yEnc developer/inventor made no attempt to integrate with MIME early on, and it worked "well enough" while being so much more efficient than either UUE or MIME/base64, that the original spec had a big enough interest base by the time the MIME integration effort got underway that it sort of disincentivised things.) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
