Re: DOS text file attachments.

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Tuesday, February  5 at 04:35 PM, quoth Michael Kjorling:
> On 5 Feb 2008 10:00 -0600, by kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Kyle Wheeler):
>> The best way to send a DOS file, if it needs to *stay* a DOS file, is 
>> to compress it (e.g. to zip it) and send the compressed form. When it 
>> is decompressed, it will return to its original DOS form.
>
> This will obviously work. I was wondering though, if sent as an 
> application/octet-stream MIME part, shouldn't the file be encoded by 
> mutt in such a way that it can get reconstructed accurately on the 
> receiver side? Yes, I know that calling plain text a/o-s is a 
> borderline case, but sometimes compressing might not really be an 
> option. (Say, if the recipient might want to read the attachment on a 
> cell phone or PDA, which may not even be able to uncompress formats 
> taken for granted on PCs.)

Perhaps, though there are two considerations to that: first, encoding 
as a/o-s is a common spammer trick that most people do not employ (so 
it may get your message tagged as spam), and second, there's no 
guarantee that a cell phone or PDA can decode base64 either.

Lastly, why would someone send a DOS text file to a cell phone (that's  
incapable of doing simple things like decompress zip files) in the 
first place?

~Kyle
- -- 
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned 
me. Now they are content with burning my books.
                                                       -- Sigmund Freud
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