Hi Peter, > > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2014-06/bin14bGZPiUPU.bin > > which > > The .bin extension issue for attachments in archived email has come up > before. Does anyone know why lists.gnu.org is doing this and whether > there'd be any point trying to get it fixed?
It's to protect users on systems that might execute it as a program willy-nilly, e.g. Microsoft. http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030603 https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-October/063693.html says how Mailman looks up the MIME part's content-type to see if it's known. The email used Content-Type: application/x-tar-gz Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="distribute.tgz" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 and application/x-tar-gz isn't in http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/ The closest is http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/gzip which leaves the tar for the user to fathom out if left to MIME types alone. Cheers, Ralph.
