Hector Santos <hsantos(_at_)santronics(_dot_)com> writes:
I know this is an old method for file attachments, but I would be
interesting to know the extent of existing systems have decided to pull
support for uuencoded file attachment at the inbound side.
I ask because I came around at least one system, GMAIL.COM, who does not
support uuencoded file attachments in their WEB interface.
Do you really mean a uuencoded file *attachment*, in the MIME sense, or do
you mean the historic uuencode behavior of just dumping the uuencode
output into the undelimited body of the message? I ask because I've never
seen the former, but that's what "attachment" means in the world of
e-mail.
If you mean the latter, there's a fundamental problem here that MIME
solves, namely that it's impossible to know for certain that you're
dealing with a uuencoded file. You can make a guess based on a line
starting with "begin " followed by some lines that look encoded, but it's
a pretty ugly heuristic and isn't reliable engineering.
uuencode is still moderately common on Usenet. I've not seen a uuencoded
file in e-mail for years.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>