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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (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
