Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 10:20:06 -0400 (EDT) From: rhh@ct.picker.com (Randall Hopper) To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph Kukulies) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: mime mail, elm, pine, netscape Message-ID: <199609031420.KAA12954@elmer.ct.picker.com> In-Reply-To: <199609031232.OAA10033@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> from "Christoph Kukulies" at Sep 3, 96 02:32:24 pm
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|It happens moreoften now that people send mail with mime
|attachments (originating possible from netscape, M$ explorer) but
|'conventional' unix mail readers like elm+mime, pine, mutt etc.
|cannot cope with these mails.
ELM+Metamail works Ok. You just need to set up a translation in your
.mailcap for text/html. I have mine set up such that it kicks off Lynx to
show the HTML, from which I can then continue to surf links off that page.
Could kick off Netscape, but I'm not always sitting at an X display.
The only catch is that you have to put in a lock in to make sure that
your browser doesn't spawn itself ad infinitum processing the text/html
attachments. This can happen because both metamail and browsers reference
mailcap files to determine what to do for a particular content type, in
particular text/html. Without this lock, Metamail kicks off the text/html
content type handler, Lynx. Then Lynx kicks off itself to handle
text/html, then Lynx ...
An alternate solution that's simpler is to use different mailcap files
for your browser and for Metamail (e.g. via $MAILCAPS [see man metamail]).
I didn't do that because I didn't want to have to maintain more than one
mailcap file.
I've attached what I did below. It isn't pretty but it works well
enough for me. Hope it helps.
|Where exactly is written down how these mails have to look like?
RFC 1521.
ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1521.txt
|What is an easy methods to decode a Mime appendix at shell level
|once the mail was saved into a file?
Well, Netscape MIME attachments are HTML (text/html content type). So just
load them into your favorite browser via Open Location
file:/.../myfile.html or start Netscape with that file on the command line.
|It happened to me that someone sent me a forwarded mail with
|a mime attachment and neither of the aforementioned readers
|could display/decode the attachment properly (didn't test M$ explorer).
|Only netscape was capable to show the attachment after I snipped the
|forward out of the mail.
Yeh, I've been there before. Most alleged MIME-capable UNIX mail readers
don't special-handle MIME attachments when forwarding like they should,
detaching and reattaching to the forwarded message in MIME format. They
just insert chars before each line of the forwarded message. Hacking is
your best bet here (love that rectangular kill feature in Emacs :-).
Randall Hopper
rhh@ct.picker.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
~/.mailcap entry:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
text/html; lynx %s 2> /dev/null; test="lynx.not-running"; needsterminal
------------------------------------------------------------------------
~/bin/lynx.not-running script:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$WERE_IN_LYNX" ]; then
#echo Testing -- not in lynx
exit 0
else
#echo Testing -- uh oh, in lynx
exit 1
fi
------------------------------------------------------------------------
~/bin/lynx script:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "$WERE_IN_LYNX" ]; then
#echo Mutex in lynx script kicking us out
exit 1
elif [ -n "$MM_CONTENTTYPE" ]; then
# Lynx wants a .html extension, and metamail doesnt give it one
ARGS=/tmp/lynxwr$$.html
trap "rm -f $ARGS; trap 0; exit" 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 12 13 14 15
cp $1 $ARGS
else
ARGS="$*"
fi
#echo Running lynx in lynx script
WERE_IN_LYNX=1
export WERE_IN_LYNX
/usr/local/bin/lynx $ARGS
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