Thanks for the thoughts. I was trying to be brief, but obviously failed to
give enough details.
I am aware that sendmail does 7 to 8 bit conversion, hence my statement that I
am using procmail not sendmail. The mention of procmail was there to indicate
that my complete setup is Procmail as LDA + Postfix as MTA. All clear so far?
Also I am quite clear that Procmail does not "Do" a lot, certainly not complex
extraction of attachments (wouldn't it be nice if it did though...), so I
wasn't expecting to find an undocumented option to do this. The mention of
"programs available to pipe through" and reference to mimencode was supposed to
indicate that I am looking for an external program.
Also I am only intending to use this option as the last step, ie during
delivery to mailboxes, hence I think Procmail is a valid solution, and the MDA
writers could easily argue that this is an LDA job rather than an MTA job...
(Although I would probably be with you that this should be an MTA task)
Perhaps someone with experience of this knows if there is such a beast around?
At worst case I wonder how difficult it would be to remove the conversion code
from Sendmail and convert to an external program.... Probably hideous...
Clients are not known, but does anyone know of any "popular" mail clients that
don't support 8 bit attachments? As in mail clients that actually support
attachments. Is it safe to assume that Pine, Mutt, etc on the unix side are 8
bit clean? I believe that Outlook, Eudora & Netscape are 8 bit capable.
Thanks for any pointers
Ed W
-----Original Message-----
From: Professional Software Engineering
[mailto:PSE-L(_at_)mail(_dot_)professional(_dot_)org]
Sent: 15 April 2002 17:37
To: procmail-users(_at_)procmail(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: How to convert to 8 bit mime format
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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