[imp] IMP can't read attachments that are not MIME

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Markus Gaugusch <markus at gaugusch.at>:

> I have problems with lots of mails that are like this:

Welcome to the club...

> --snip--
> Bla bla bla
>
> 644 begin attachment.zip
> [data]
> end
>
> 644 begin attachment2.zip
> [data]
> end
> --snip--

These are uuencoded attachments included in-line in the email.  Since there
is no real standard for uuencode, more less uuencoded attachments in-line
in an email, these are non-standard implementations.

> No part of the header contains MIME info.

Because uuencode is not supported in MIME in any way, and this format is
an ad-hoc format that pre-dates MIME.  It was used almost exclusively,
as far as generating them, by PC/Windows based e-mail servers.

> Unfortunately(?), Mozilla and
> Outlook can show those attachments, and people here are getting angry
> because they can't do so using IMP.

I think the CVS HEAD version has uuencode support, added about a month or
so ago?  But nothing in the release tree, and I really doubt it will be
backported.

BTW, doing anything (client end) with these will be a huge performance hit.
It means either you have to scan every message in your mailbox for these, and
convert it on the fly (or locally in the inbox) to a mime format, or you need to
modify every viewer to look for this stuff and handle it in some way.
Scanning every message this way (either way) is going to be a major performance
hit.

Some mail gateway products (e.g. PMDF) have conversion support which will
(again, a performance hit, but it is at the receiving server end, rather than
the client end, so it isn't as bad) scan incoming mail for these and convert
the message to a MIME attachment.  I recommend you put a good gateway
product in front of any PC/Windows mail server that is more than 5 years
old (including older Exchange servers, but not newer ones since say Exchange
2000).

> I'd really like to keep IMP and wouldn't like to be forced to use Outlook
> Web Access :-((

You must have some local email system that is incorrectly sending mail in
this acient and mostly discarded format?  If so, my advice is to find that mail
server and fix it.  It is common, for example in GroupWise systems, but it
is simply a configuration issue to switch most such systems (e.g. GroupWise
5 or newer) to using MIME instead.  You will be doing the whole world a service
if you eliminate any source of these uuencode attachment containing messages.

> Can anybody help me?

Not really, but I can inform you a bit about it.  Or maybe if you can
run CVS HEAD of IMP it may (IIRC) handle these now?

> Thanks!
> Markus Gaugusch

--
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Why get even? Get odd!