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Re: How to convert to 8 bit mime format

2002-04-15 09:50:45
At 16:50 2002-04-15 +0100, Edward Wildgoose did say:
Are there any programs to pipe through and ensure that attachments are in 8 bit mime format?

The logic is that bandwidth is important for my users and I am making the assumption that all the popular mail clients on windows are 8 bit clean,

Big assumption. Also a big assumption that all your users are using Windows, or will continue to use Windows, unless you're in a corporate environ.

hence since this is the last step before local delivery it should be safe to force a conversion to 8 bit... Does this sounds reasonable?

Sendmail itself has been able to do this for quite some time -- see the "MIME7TO8" option (support for which is included by default, but depending on your distro - esp if you're using a "package" instead of directly compiling sources, who knows).

From the 2nd Edition "Bat Book"  18.8.21

        "Unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, we recommend
        that MIME7TO8 remain enabled".

Which is not to say that the _option_ is turned on for delivery, but rather that the option is compiled as an _available_ one. To check whether it is available, use:

        sendmail -d0.1 < /dev/null

Sll of this assumes that you're running sendmail as your MTA. See the sendmail docs for further information on its use.

The delivery flag which enables this _only_ works for single-part mime messages, though it's possible something has changed in this regard within sendmail. If you're looking for a third-party solution to do something similar, I would expect that you'd probably find references to it from people discussing this same MTA option, so I'd start there.

I had a look at mimencode, but this doesn't seem to do this? The mail system is Procmail, not sendmail, hence no support there either.

The LDA may be procmail, but procmail isn't an MTA. The whole purpose of MIME was to allow 8-bit messages to pass through older MTAs, which means it's really the jurisdiction of the MTA.

Procmail is not going to _do_ the conversion itself - it can pass the message through to a program to do the conversion before delivering it into a mailbox though.

---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

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