At 9:25 PM -0500 12/10/01, Gary Funck is rumored to have typed:
Has this been discussed before? What do the procmail gurus/users/advocates
think aobut the idea of upgrading procmail's understanding of MIME-encoded
mail?
I am only a user of procmail and hardly a guru, but I think that's a
_terrible_ idea. It makes procmail unnecessarily heavy, to perform a
basically unnecessary function.
The concept of an "attachment" doesn't really _exist_ except in the eye of
the client; everything in an email message is (with some rare exceptions)
simple 7-bit text; a binary us BASE64-encoded, a mailing list digest is
seperated (OE, for example, treats a MIME digest as a series of attachments,
while Eudora and other sensible clients explode into a mailbox - so is a MIME
digest entry an attachment or not?), but it's all just a text stream.
procmail deals specifically with that stream and does it quite well, leaving
converting that stream to something else to other applications specifically
designed to do that (or in the case of OE, badly designed to do that). If you
try to build in to procmail complete MIME handling, you are in essense
building an email client without a reader, with the combinate requirements to
decide exactly what to do with _every_ conceivable MIME type...if current
email clients can't get their act together, how could procmail possibly get
it "right?"
You're also bloating what is now a small, fast application to the point
where there would be a substancial memory and processing hit. It sounds more
like you're proposing a different application than suggesting an expansion of
procmail (since part of the driving force behind it is that the base
featureset is locked).
Personally, I would hate to see procmail forced into the role of a MIME
"swiss-army knife;" I _like_ procmail just the way it is - lean, mean, and
keen.
Charlie (who's embarrassed about that last, but couldn't help
himself)
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