<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: DOS text file attachments.

I think the point that the people on the Postfix mailing list were trying to make is that the MUA (in this case mutt) should not be sending something to the MTA that is marked as text/plain, but has CRLF line endings since text/plain on Unix has just LF line endings.
Me, I don't know what should do what with what for this type of file. If it is converted by the MUA to have just LF line endings then the Windows PC I'm sending it to will still see it as a DOS text file since the MTA has to convert it to CRLF for the smtp protocol. Then again if the MTA noticed that the lines already had CRLF on the end and didn't "convert" it then that would work too. Also if the libmagic stuff noticed that a file was DOS text and reported it as application/octet-stream then I guess that would work too.
Maybe I just tell mutt to use a shell script as the MTA and I get that to convert all text to LF line endings then pass it on to the real MTA. Would that work ? I assume all data from mutt to the MTA will be text ? i.e. already be base64 encoded if needs be ? 

Thanks everyone or your help.

Scott.

On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 12:08:07PM -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote:

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