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Re: MIME and Postcript - a user perspective

1992-05-05 10:38:16
How about checking out the Postscript to see if it needs q-p encoding
before applying the encoding. I imagine that the greatest majority of all
Postscript is just plain ASCII. Doing this would require reading all the
Postscript once before sending it off, and that may be inefficient, but it
seems like it might be a worth while tradeoff to be nice to non-MIME
folks. Also, doesn't the contents have to be read once anyway to gaurantee
uniqness of the encapsulation boundaries? 

Laurence Lundblade                       206-543-5617
  lgl(_at_)cac(_dot_)washington(_dot_)edu
     Computing and Communications, University of Washington, Seattle 


On Mon, 4 May 1992, Marshall Rose wrote:

Steve - nothing prevents you from slapping a postscript file into a
message, adding these two headers

      MIME-Version: 1.0
      Content-Type: application/postscript

and just sending it as is.  However, when you run into a mailer that
truncates/wraps long lines, or generally abuses the message body, keep
in mind that this is the risk you run.

If you use my software (multi-media MH), and you ask it to send
postscript, it will use quoted-printable because this adds quite a
degree of safeness.  Of course, you can instead add the two headers
above.

In a sense you are asking for a one-sided protocol: oh, I want it to
work when I send it to people who know what I'm doing, and I also want
it to work when I send it to people who don't know what I'm doing.
This is an inconsistent set of requirements.

/mtr



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