Re: [OT] message formats (was: browser footprint)

[Scott Bennett <bennett@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:00:58 +0200 Florian Reitmeir <florian@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Scott Bennett wrote:
>>     Then you should send your suggestion to Sun Microsystems, Inc., not
>>to me, because this particular implementation is the Solaris version.  You
>>may also want to suggest something similar to the FreeBSD development team
>>for UCBmail (likewise the NetBSD and OpenBSD teams) because that is included
>>in the base system just as mailx is with Solaris, and probably also to
>>the LINUX developers, though I don't use LINUX and do not know for sure
>>that they maintain a version of mailx.  It is indeed a UNIX standard, so
>>live with it.
>
>the man-page of mailx on UNIX states:

     You fail to mention which sort of UNIX you're looking at.
>
>------- snap
>mailx supports the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standard
>in two ways: it supports the creation of multipart and text/enriched
>messages, and supports the reading of MIME messages by automatically
>invoking the metamail(1) program when necessary. 
>------- snap

     The Solaris version doesn't support it, and there is no mention of
MIME in the man page for it.
>
>and the man-page of metamail:
>
>------- snap
>Note also that metamail automatically decodes mail that has been encoded
>for 7-bit transport if the mail includes a ``Content-Transfer-Encoding''
>header as specified by RFC 1341. If data has been encoded via the
>"base64" encoding, it will map CRLF to local newlines for textual data,
>but not for other data, unless instructed otherwise by a textualnewlines
>field in a mailcap entry. 
>------- snap
>
     So what?
>
>so why not just end the discussion, by correctly configuring your
>mailclient?
>
     As previously noted more than once, there is no support for either
non-ASCII character sets or MIME in the Solaris mailx.  See another
message for a practical reason for my not changing mailers at this time.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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