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From: strauss@Aero.Org (Daryll Strauss)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: binhex v. uuencode enclosures
Message-ID: <87972@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Date: 8 Oct 90 21:29:30 GMT
References: <289@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <1990Oct6.074537.14443@d.cs.okstate.edu> <1990Oct8.165609.24787@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@aerospace.aero.org
Reply-To: strauss@Aero.Org (Daryll Strauss)
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation
Lines: 65

In article <1990Oct8.165609.24787@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) writes:
|> 
|> There you hit on the second reason.  I'm not familiar, either, and I can't
|> decode files in unknown formats.  Uuencode I can figure out, but until John
|> Norstad said "AppleSingle", I had no idea how things were packed within
|> the file.  Both people who requested that Eudora handle this format
|> were unable to tell me anything beyond "uuencode".
|> 
|> There is only so far I will go to repair somebody else's mistakes.  Tracking
|> down file formats from my "competitors" is a bit too far, given the other
|> things I have to do, and the budget on which I have to do them.
|> 
|> Third: the BinHex intro line "\n(This file must be converted with BinHex...)" is awfully explicit.  Uuencode says: "\nbegin 644 name of file".
|> This is a royal pain in the rear end, since it's hardly inconceivable that
|> such a line might show up in the body of a message, and have *NOTHING* to do
|> with uuencode.  The more "guessing" in my program, the less happy I am;
|> guessing costs performance, space, and reliability.
|> 
|> >Just send it as uuencode and he can do
|> >something with it even if ??? is a Mac since his software supports both
|> >flavors. So really... how hard _is_ it to support the uuencoded enclosures?
|> 
|> And how hard is it for the other platform to decode BinHex?  If the other
|> platform is UNIX, the answer is, "not hard".  I dunno about the benighted
|> who use IBM-PC type thingies; maybe they have uudecode, but do they
|> know AppleSingle?  I suspect not.  Can they write code to handle it?
|> Probably, but then they could have ported UNIX xbin, too.  I don't buy this
|> one; if Eudora gets uuencode, it will be to communicate with Quickmail,
|> not MS-DOS.
|> 
|> Now that I know the magic word (AppleSingle), I will consider putting uuencode
|> support in Eudora, though it won't be my top priority.
|> 
|> (PS-Anybody know where AppleSingle is documented?  Email would do fine...)
|> --
|> Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
|> Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner

That really isn't a fair description of the situation. We are using
GatorMail-Q and every message with an enclosure includes this line in
the header:
	Content-Type: x-uuencode-apple-single
So, there is documentation as to what the format is for enclosed
message. In fact, the Content-Type header is documented in RFC-1049 and
RFC-1154 so it isn't like they made this up out of the blew. The rfc
indicates that any atom on the right-hand-size of a Content-Type is a
"private atom", so they just created their own atom to indicate the type
of encoding used in the enclosure.

The Gatorbox software includes some C code and manual page that converts
between apple-double and apple-single format, so most folks with
Gatorboxes should have that.

I can't argue about what the "best" format for enclosing documents, but
it seems that Cayman/StarNine did a reasonable job with their enclosure.

							- |Daryll

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