Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: binmail vs MMDF mail file format
Message-ID: <8979@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 17 Jul 89 14:49:55 GMT
References: <113918@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <8887@chinet.chi.il.us> <12184@s.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 21

In article <12184@s.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes:
>>AT&T's PMX mailer products include a new /bin/mail that uses
>>Content-Type: and Content-Length: headers to avoid the problem.  Anything

>er..  gads!  While that sounds like a possibly nice feature, it's
>*EXTREMELY* un-RFC-822-ish.  Mush has to live out here in the world
>of RFC-822 where mailing binary files around breaks things all
>over the place.

The /bin/mail included with the PMX products uses /usr/lib/binarsys to
look up whether the destination (or next-hop) can handle binary attachments
and will bounce them if not (although it would be easy to encode on an
as-needed basis).  The MUA has a configuration option to encode attachments
using btoa, which is the method I would like to see other MUA's use since
they probably can't provide an alternate /bin/mail. The mail passed to
non-binary hosts should go through normal mailers and is only
un-RFC-822-ish due to the extra headers that do not have the leading X-.
There are several things I don't like about the PMX-mailers but I'll 
refrain from AT&T bashing unless someone asks...

Les Mikesell