On Thu 21 Jan, Brent J. Nordquist wrote:
Stephen Perkins wrote:
I may have painted with too broad a brush in my message. Let me describe
more precisely my situation; it sounds like yours may be different.
I moved all my messages from Outlook 98 (not Express) to a UNIX-based
IMAP server, using the Outlook 98 IMAP mail "Account" (or whatever
it's called). The form they now take is: every message that had one
or more attachments, is now a multi-part MIME message, with a single
attachment (bearing the MIME type "application/ms-tnef" and the name
"winmail.dat"), in which all the original attachments are buried.
Well, that's odd, because for interests sake I just tried something
like this.
I started composing a message in Outlook 98. Dragged on a number
of attachments, then saved that message to an IMAP folder. I then
went and looked at the IMAP folder by hand, and it was exactly how
I'd expect it to be, a multi-part MIME message will all the
attachments correct.
So, what's different about your mail?
Hmmm... speaking to our admins here it seems that UUENCODE/MIME is an
exchange server switch. It can be globally set one way of the other.
This would explain why only MS Outlook (vs outlook express, pine, etc) email
attachments are affected. Outlook users are the only ones using exchange.
Unfortunately, due to some legacy user MUAs, we use UUENCODE and thus
attachments are inlined uuencoded documents. The problem may be somewhat
independent of IMAP and the decision to select UUENCODE is based on policy.
That seems to describe why our outlook users send UUENCODED attachments.
Our admins may not be willing to change the switch, so the question now
becomes, given that I have email with inlined uuencoded attachments, has
anyone written a text filter that recognizes these attachments and correctly
uudecodes them to files.
I certainly hope so! Thanks in advance for any thoughts,
- Steve
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