Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,comp.answers,news.answers Path: news1.ucsd.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!library.ucla.edu!unixg.ubc.ca!atha!sgiblab!sgigate.sgi.com!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!usc!news.cerf.net!nntp2.cerf.net!shrike.irvine.com!jsweet From: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Subject: comp.mail.mime FAQ, part 1 of 3 (frequently asked questions list) Content-Type: message/partial; number=1; total=3; id="" Followup-To: comp.mail.mime Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Originator: jsweet@fester.irvine.com Sender: usenet@irvine.com (News Administration) Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: Irvine Compiler Corp., Irvine, California, USA Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 07:28:38 GMT Supersedes: Message-ID: Summary: This posting contains answers to some of the Frequently Asked Questions about MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Please read it before posting a question to comp.mail.mime. Expires: Mon, 1 Jan 1996 07:30:02 GMT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Lines: 900 Xref: news1.ucsd.edu comp.mail.mime:6523 comp.answers:12716 news.answers:49141 Archive-Name: mail/mime-faq/part1 Version: $Id: mime1,v 3.14 1995/09/03 06:14:01 jsweet Rel $ Posting-Frequency: monthly -- ========================================================== comp.mail.mime frequently asked questions list (FAQ) (1/3) ========================================================== Part 1: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about MIME ~~~~~~ -- Overview -------- This is part 1 of a Frequently Asked Questions document about MIME, the multipurpose and multi-media standard for Internet mail. Part 1 covers frequently asked questions. Part 2 is a listing of MIME products. Part 3 covers advanced topics. Sections in the table of contents that have changed since the last posting are marked with a '!' in the first column. New sections are marked with '+'. Contents ~~~~~~~~ Part 1: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about MIME (this file) ======================================================== 1) Introduction 1.1) Authorship 1.2) Conventions ! 1.3) Where can I get the comp.mail.mime FAQ? 2) What is MIME? 2.1) Introduction 2.2) MIME features that may or may not be present 2.3) Help! I got a message in MIME format--how do I decode it? ! 2.4) Further information 2.5) MIME glossary 2.6) Newsgroups and mailing lists 3) Miscellaneous questions 3.1) What can I use to display MIME messages? 3.2) What's "text/enriched"? 3.3) What about security issues? 3.4) So, does MIME introduce any new security problems? 3.5) What about a group 3 facsimile encoding? 3.6) Should I always use external body parts to save space? 3.7) What mail servers can I reference? 3.8) Can I interwork between MIME and X.400? 3.9) Why does MIME define base64 instead of using uuencode? 3.10) How can I use uuencode with MIME? 4) MIME information available from the Internet 4.1) Anonymous FTP 4.2) Mail-based archive servers 4.3) Gopher 4.4) World Wide Web 5) Published books and articles 6) MIME based relays for commercial mail services 6.1) Large national or international providers 6.1.1) ATTMAIL 6.1.2) CompuServe 6.1.3) RadioMail 6.2) Local and regional providers Part 2: MIME products (posted separately) ===================== 7) Freely available MIME packages ! 7.1) Libraries and Patches ! 7.2) Conversion tools and extension packages ! 7.3) Mail user agents and transport systems ! 8) Commercial MIME packages 9) Packages for MIME in USENET 9.1) Introduction 9.2) News readers and transports with MIME support Part 3: Advanced topics (posted separately) ======================= 10) Information ! 10.1) MIME-relevant RFCs and other standards ! 10.2) MIME types ! 10.2.1) List of registered MIME types 10.2.2) List of known unregistered MIME types 10.3) Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups 11) Developers' FAQs 11.1) How can I register a new MIME type? 11.2) What's ESMTP, and how does it affect MIME? 11.3) Where can I get some sample MIME messages? 11.4) Wouldn't MIME be better if it did ? 11.5) So what about multilevel encodings? 11.6) Why doesn't MIME include a mechanism for compression? 11.7) What's this Content-Disposition header? ! 12) Acknowledgements 13) Permissions -- 1) Introduction --------------- 1.1) Authorship Current maintainer: Jerry Sweet Previous maintainers (thanks, guys!): Ed Vielmetti - originator Tim Goodwin Contributions have come from a cast of dozens; see section 12 for the list of contributors. -------------------------------- 1.2) Conventions - Direct quotations begin with an attribution in a standard format, and are indented by four spaces. - Pointers to resources available via the Internet, such as references to FTPable goodies, appear in WWW URL format. URLs beginning with "ftp:" refer to FTP sites. For example: ftp://domain.name/path/to/package Those with FTP access, but without WWW access, may treat such references as follows: 1. Log into host domain.name using anonymous FTP 2. Look for /path/to/package An FTP reference usually lists only the distribution site; please try your nearest FTP archive first. Archie may be of some help here. URLs beginning with "http:" refer to WWW servers. URLs beginning with "gopher:" refer to gopher servers. Internet browsing tools, such as Mosaic, know about URLs. - You'll occasionally see text in braces, like this. { Here is some example meta-text. } Sometimes, this indicates a place where information is missing, or where the information may be unreliable, or where major changes are planned in the near future. You can ignore these if you're just looking for information. But if you can help fill in the gaps, and you want to achieve fame, fortune, and your name at the bottom of this FAQ, please send e-mail to the maintainer. -------------------------------- 1.3) Where can I get the comp.mail.mime FAQ? - It is posted approximately monthly to the newsgroups comp.mail.mime, comp.answers, and news.answers. The "Expires:" field is set such that---on systems that honor this field---the most recent edition will always be in the news article database. - Many sites archive news.answers postings, including these: ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/mail/mime-faq/ ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/mail/mime-faq/ If possible, please try to find a closer site; for example, by asking archie for "mime-faq". - HTML versions of the MIME FAQ are available at these URLs: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/text/faq/usenet/mail/mime-faq/top.html (Brought to you by Ohio State University, USA.) http://www.cs.ruu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/mail/mime-faq/.html (Brought to you by the Department of Computer Science, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.) If you find a non-working hypertext link in the HTML versions, you're welcome to bring it to the attention of the MIME FAQ maintainer, but unless it's a problem with a URL reference in the original document, the MIME FAQ maintainer probably can't fix it directly. In particular, RFC references in the Ohio State version may still point to pages saying "they've been moved". This is beyond the control of the MIME FAQ maintainer. - If you are reading this FAQ via some fixed medium such as hardcopy or CD-ROM, please try to obtain the latest edition from the net instead. There is also a "meta-FAQ", posted monthly, that attempts to help with any special problems that you may have with reading MIME messages, such as this one. -- 2) What is MIME? ---------------- 2.1) Introduction MIME, the Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions, is a freely available specification that offers a way to interchange text in languages with different character sets, and multi-media e-mail among many different computer systems that use Internet mail standards. If you were bored with plain text e-mail messages, thanks to MIME you now can create and read e-mail messages containing these things: - character sets other than ASCII - enriched text - images - sounds - other messages (reliably encapsulated) - tar files - PostScript - FTPable file pointers - other stuff MIME supports not only several pre-defined types of non-textual message contents, such as 8-bit 8000Hz-sampled mu-LAW audio, GIF image files, and PostScript programs, but also permits you to define your own types of message parts. The ability to create e-mail messages with audio and other non-textual contents has been around for a while, but almost always as part of a vendor-specific "solution." This means that you can't create a message on a NeXT system containing PostScript information and "Lip Service" (NeXT's audio e-mail tool) and easily handle the same message on an HP 9000/710, a Sun SPARCstation IPC, and a Silicon Graphics Iris. That's a problem that MIME helps to solve. One of the best things about MIME is that it's a "four-wheel drive protocol" (to borrow a description applied originally to PhoneNet by Einar Stefferud). MIME was carefully designed to survive many of the most bizarre variations of SMTP, UUCP, and Procrustean mail transport protocols, such as BITNET and MMDF, that like to slice, dice, and stretch the headers and bodies of e-mail messages. Here are a few examples of how MIME is being used in the real world, now. 1. Dr. Marshall T. Rose mails out his SNMP-related newsletter, "The Simple Times" as multi-media e-mail messages in several forms: - in a PostScript form, with beautiful typesetting and a two-column page layout, suitable for printing on a laser printer; - in a "text/richtext" form (explained in question 3.2), suitable for display on a mildly intelligent ASCII terminal; and - in a plain text, ordinary message form. (SNMP is the Simple Network Management Protocol.) 2. IETF document announcements (RFCs, Internet Drafts, etc.) are structured as multipart MIME messages. The first part contains the document abstract. The second part is itself a multipart message, containing external references to the document itself (one via a mail-server, one via anonymous FTP). Thus, with a suitable UA (User Agent, see 2.5 for glossary), you can read the abstract, and then have the complete document retrieved for you (by the most appropriate method) at the press of a button. 3. A "pointer" to this FAQ is posted weekly in comp.mail.mime. The pointer article contains MIME external contents that MIME-capable mail user agents can use to obtain the FAQ via Internet FTP or via mail server. -------------------------------- 2.2) MIME features that may or may not be present Implementations of multi-media e-mail need not support the full spec; it's possible to have a useful product that does not explore all of the nooks and crannies of the standard. Furthermore, MIME permits a message to contain alternative parts for consumption by sites that can't necessarily display or listen to all the good stuff. Here is a list of features that someone with a good, functional mail user agent might include for MIME support. - Displays GIF, JPEG, and PBM encoded images, using e.g. 'xv' in the X Window System, or (name of windows program here) in Microsoft Windows. - Displays PostScript parts, using e.g. something that prints to a PostScript printer, or that invokes GhostScript on an X Window System display, or that uses Display PostScript. - Obtains external body parts via Internet FTP or via mail server. - Plays audio parts on workstations that support digital audio. On the other hand, the minimal requirements for a MIME-conformant MUA are almost trivial, yet still provide increased functionality. (The minimal requirements are mainly concerned with ensuring that users are not shown raw data from a MIME message inappropriately.) See also: - RFC 1820, the "Multimedia E-mail (MIME) User Agent Checklist", by Erik Huizer. -------------------------------- 2.3) Help! I got a message in MIME format--how do I decode it? Check out the MIME meta-FAQ, which is posted in comp.mail.mime along with this FAQ. The meta-FAQ offers general advice for dealing with various MIME problems. Of course, there are lots of options for decoding a MIME message, some of which are enumerated in part 2 of this FAQ. -------------------------------- 2.4) Further information A nice overview of the MIME specification by Mark Grand is available from: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/md/mdg/mime.ps ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/md/mdg/mime.txt [ Nischal Sheth 29-May-1995 ] Other URLs for the PS and text versions of the document are: ftp://romulus.ucs.uoknor.edu/mirrors/networking/mail/mime/mime.ps ftp://romulus.ucs.uoknor.edu/mirrors/networking/mail/mime/mime.txt Other information: [ Arjan van der Meer 30-Jan-1995 ] Mail for more info: mime-DocServer@docserver.cac.washington.edu It sent me a brief and clear E-mailing about how and what MIME is. { Any other documents that should be referenced? } -------------------------------- 2.5) MIME glossary Every subculture needs its list of buzzwords, here's a start at a collection for MIME. body the part of a message after the header (the "meat") content a portion of a MIME message CTE content transfer encoding (e.g. base64, quoted-printable, etc.) ESMTP Extended SMTP - RFC 1651 external part a "pointer" to a part available via FTP or other means GIF graphical interchange format for images header the To, From, Subject, etc. at the start of a message HTML hypertext markup language; used in WWW documents JPEG an image compression standard for still images mail transport the "post office", e.g. sendmail, smail, MMDF, etc. MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions - RFC 1521 MPEG an image compression standard for moving pictures MTA Mail Transport Agent, see "mail transport" MUA Mail User Agent, see "user agent" multi-media nebulous marketroid term meaning audio and visual stuff part a piece of a MIME message containing some data type PBM an image format PEM Privacy Enhanced Mail PostScript a popular page description language RFC request for comments; proposed or standard Internet protocols SMTP Simple Mail Transport Protocol - RFC 821 text/enriched simple text markup language for MIME - RFC 1563 text/simplemail another (even simpler?) text markup language URL WWW uniform resource locator; access-method://host/path user agent the end user's mail program, e.g. MH, ELM, /bin/mail, etc. WWW the worldwide web (see section 4.4) -------------------------------- 2.6) Newsgroups and mailing lists - You're probably reading comp.mail.mime at the moment. This is the USENET newsgroup devoted to discussions of MIME. - There is also a mailing list, info-mime, which is gatewayed with comp.mail.mime. This is a bidirectional gateway, so every message to the mailing list also appears on the newsgroup, and vice versa. If you are unable or unwilling to read USENET news, send subscription requests to: info-mime-request@cs.utk.edu - There is a UK exploder for info-mime (info-mime-uk). Contact: info-mime-uk-request@mailbase.ac.uk The Mailbase software archives all contributions, which are then accessible via these URLs: ftp://mailbase.ac.uk gopher://mailbase.ac.uk ...and via mailserver; send a message to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk, with a message body containing, e.g. "send info-mime-uk 08-1993". - The archive ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/usenet/comp.mail.mime stores articles in three formats: by subject, by article number, and by month. See the README file for more information. - There is also a [comp.mail.multi-media] newsgroup, which contains general discussions of multi-media e-mail, not necessarily MIME. - There are various mailing lists specific to particular implementations of MIME. If we know of such a list, it is mentioned in the section of this document about that implementation. -- 3) Miscellaneous questions -------------------------- 3.1) What can I use to display MIME messages? You need something that understands MIME-structured messages and also understands how to display the different kinds of body parts. Details of many freely available and commercial packages to do just that can be found in part 2 of this FAQ. -------------------------------- 3.2) What's "text/enriched"? The text/enriched type offers simple text markup, without making the text unreadable to someone without the software to interpret it. The text/enriched scheme uses markup commands enclosed in angle brackets. For example, here is how you would embolden a single word. The text/enriched type is defined in RFC 1563. It supersedes text/richtext, which was defined in RFC 1341. See part 3 of this FAQ for information about how to obtain RFCs. A freely available implementation of a viewer for text/enriched is part of the metamail 2.7 "richtext" program, via the undocumented command line option "-e". See part 2 of this FAQ for details about metamail. Other markup language proposals have been made. One is simplemail, which is more like a standardization of certain existing practices in mail and news articles. For example, here is how you would *emphasize* a single word. Simplemail is explained in an Internet Draft by Bill Janssen and Evan Kirshenbaum. See part 3 of this FAQ for information about how to obtain Internet Drafts. -------------------------------- 3.3) What about security issues? Both users and administrators should be aware that ordinary Internet and UUCP e-mail is not secure. No authentication, confidentiality, or data integrity properties are provided in SMTP, RFC 822, or MIME. Persons desiring any or all of those security properties in their e-mail should look into the use of Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM). At least one no-cost implementation of PEM is available in the US and Canada. There are also a number of implementations being developed in Europe (hopefully these will not suffer the same restrictions on export). PEM will (eventually) be integrated with MIME. See draft-ietf-pem-mime-03.txt for the latest work on this. A system providing similar functionality to PEM implementations is PGP. PGP is an implementation, not a specification, and it does not carry the blessing of the IETF, or any other body. It is, however, available at no cost throughout the world (although its status with respect to certain US patents is dubious). Caveat emptor. [ "Jeffrey I. Schiller" 24-Jun-1994 ] There is now a freeware version of PGP that is not dubious from a patent standpoint. Billg@yrkpa.kias.com notes the existence of the PGP FAQ from alt.security.pgp. In addition to enumerating various implementations, that document indicates that information about how to obtain the officially blessed version of PGP is available from: http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp-form.html There is also an O'Reilly book out on the subject of PGP. It contains, among other useful information, an unflinching report on how PGP came to be. { This section needs additional information, URLs, etc. } -------------------------------- 3.4) So, does MIME introduce any new security problems? Yes. MIME user agents can do previously unheard of things with mail messages, notably giving them as input to other programs. PostScript is probably the biggest potential security hole. One famous example is the "melting screen" PostScript program, which destroys screens maintained by Display PostScript implementations. For another example, PostScript can be used to change the password on some PostScript printers with previously undefined passwords, which denies the use of the printer until the printer's password can (somehow) be changed back. Yet other Display PostScript implementations may allow file operations. (NeXTstep wisely disables file operations. With GhostScript, they can be disabled by the "-dSAFER" command line option. Use of this option (in mailcap, etc.) is highly recommended.) The enumeration of these security holes is not to be interpreted as encouragement to exploit the holes. They are mentioned only because they are well known. Refer to books such as "Practical UNIX Security" and to news groups such as comp.security.misc for general information about system security. -------------------------------- 3.5) What about a group 3 facsimile encoding? It is rumored that there was an attempt to include G3 FAX in the original MIME specification, but that it was impossible for the authors of the MIME specification to gain a consensus on how to encode the data. So G3 FAX has been left for a future MIME implementation. But you can always define your own body part. Here are some snippets relevant to MIME and FAX. The MIME-MHS documents define a G3Fax body part that is conformant with the X.400 G3Fax definition. [ Stuart Lynne 30-Dec-1992 ] I have prototype scripts operating with metamail to do some of this. Some of it is in contrib directory. Currently I have 2 scripts: mm2fax - convert mail and metamail messages to TIFF/F (uses various tools to convert different body parts to TIFF/F); faxmm - send rfc822 and mime e-mail messages via facsimile (uses mm2fax to convert to TIFF/F). [ Ned Freed 31-Dec-1992 ] PMDF-FAX is a set of channel programs for PMDF that provide facilities for converting text, PostScript, and various other formats into Group 3 FAX, as well as a set of programs that take these Group 3 FAX files and use them to drive a variety of FAX modems. MIME is used throughout to provide type information, multipart facilities, and so forth. PMDF-FAX was developed with MIME in mind from the outset. -------------------------------- 3.6) Should I always use external body parts to save space? Not necessarily. In many cases, for example, at the ends of UUCP connections, your recipients may not be able to retrieve external body parts easily. It depends on your audience. Making files available via a mail server is to be encouraged. It is always possible to provide MIME alternative parts that first offer FTP, then mail server options. -------------------------------- 3.7) What mail servers can I reference? There are various mail servers available. Check news.answers for the FAQ about mail server software. We do not presently have a recommendation. -------------------------------- 3.8) Can I interwork between MIME and X.400? Conversion between RFC 822 and X.400 is defined in RFC 1327 and RFC 1495. Recently, the MIME-MHS working group has published RFCs (which are on the IAB standards track) that extend RFC 1327 to define conversions between MIME and X.400. Some MTAs, notably the ISODE Consortium's version of PP (see section 8) have MIME gatewaying support. -------------------------------- 3.9) Why does MIME define base64 instead of using uuencode? [ Ed Greshko 15-Apr-1994 ] The *major* reason is that there is no standard for uuencode. While it is popular, the many flavors of uuencode in existence make it a prime candidate for *non*-interoperability. [ John Gardiner Myers 1-Jun-1994 ] Some gateways damage messages in the more common uuencode formats. Gateways that convert between EBCDIC and ASCII, in particular, tend to damage some of the characters used in the uuencode format. The base64 encoding is designed to be invulnerable to all known gateways. [ Ned Freed 26-Oct-1994 ] Well, once you say UUENCODE you've already bought into a whole bunch of different formats. There are lots of different encoders out there that produce completely different variants of UUENCODE. (I just ran into a new one I had never seen before yesterday, and it happens to be one I know won't work with some of the decoders I've used.) And sometimes they interoperate and sometimes they don't. Because of the lack of a standard version of UUENCODE and the resulting interoperability problems, as well as various problems with the encoding character set used by some UUENCODE implementations, MIME elected to go with an existing encoding originally defined, if memory serves, in RFC989 back in 1987, as well as adding a new "lightweight" encoding mechanism for material that's mostly text. I should also point out that most MIME-ware supports UUENCODE as a format even if though it is nonstandard and causes interoperability problems. There are a bunch of other encodings in use, like base85, btoa, and hexadecimal. However, you really don't see these that often in practice. { Additional information, horror stories, etc., welcome. } -------------------------------- 3.10) How can I use uuencode with MIME? The following idea from Nathaniel may be useful. For some examples of this in action, see the newsgroup clari.feature.dilbert. [ Nathaniel Borenstein 4-Nov-93 ] I recently convinced myself that you can use multipart/alternative to get a nice effect for both MIME-smart recipients and uuencode-loving recipients, although it is ugly and wasteful: Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary=foo --foo Content-type: application/octet-stream; name=foo.uu ...uuencoded data goes here.... --foo Content-type: real-mime-type Content-type: base64 base64-encoded data goes here --foo-- A good MIME viewer will only use the second part, the real MIME data. A uuencode-oriented system, however, should ignore everything EXCEPT the uuencoded data, because of the way uuencode works (everything before the "begin" line and after the "end" line is ignored). I certainly wouldn't want to recommend the above as standard practice, but I imagine that are enclaves or situations where it could be useful. -- 4) MIME information available from the Internet ----------------------------------------------- 4.1) Anonymous FTP Information about FTPable stuff is scattered throughout this FAQ. More specifically, look into the RFCs mentioned in part 3 of this FAQ. Other goodies can be found in the MH and MetaMail source trees. Refer to part 2 of this FAQ for lots of details and URLs beginning with "ftp:". Refer to section 10.1 for information about how to retrieve RFCs via FTP. -------------------------------- 4.2) Mail-based archive servers A few Internet sites whose archives contain MIME-related information support retrieval via e-mail servers. One of these is ics.uci.edu. References in URL form to ftp.ics.uci.edu may be used to formulate retrieval requests to send to the archive-server address at ics.uci.edu. To find out more about how to use that mail server, send a message whose body contains the line "help" to the address "archive-server@ics.uci.edu". RFCs may be requested from a mail-based archive server. Refer to section 10.1 for information about how to do that. Several freely available packages, including ServiceMail and metamail, contain mail-based archive servers. Some commercial packages do as well. Refer to part 2 of this FAQ for details. Installing a mail-based archive server at your site makes it possible to send out messages containing external body contents that can be used to retrieve materials automatically from your site via e-mail. -------------------------------- 4.3) Gopher [ Randall Atkinson 2-Jan-1993 ] There is experimental work underway in the Internet Gopher community to include MIME as a mechanism for marking the content of files. The freely distributable Gopher client for NeXTstep 3.0 includes MIME support. Other gopher clients will probably add it eventually. -------------------------------- 4.4) World Wide Web [ Marc VanHeyningen 26-Jun-1993 ] There is more-than-experimental work underway in the Internet World Wide Web (WWW) community to use MIME as the mechanism for marking the contents of information exchanged via HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP); the specification of HTTP/1.0 dictates that both the request and the response are more or less MIME-compliant messages. There are implementations already doing this today. Support is also included for format negotiation (e.g. a server might have both a PostScript and a plaintext version of a paper and decide which to send based on what the client can accept, presentation preferences, size, and the like.) It's nearly as complicated as the "badness" mechanisms in TeX, and unrelated to (and, for its application, probably superior to) the multipart/alternative MIME type. There is an FAQ for WWW in comp.infosystems.www -- 5) Published books and articles ------------------------------- - Books The Internet Message: closing the book with electronic mail Marshall T. Rose Prentice-Hall ISBN 0-13-092941-7 This book is a complete review of the Internet world of electronic mail, including recent developments. There is considerable detail, and it would make the perfect companion to the mail RFCs for any budding implementor. On the other hand, the detail should be quite easy to skip for those interested in just an overview. As usual, Marshall's informed and often vigorous opinions are clearly marked off as "soapboxes", to be objectively skipped or delightedly sought out, according to preference. One chapter of the book is devoted to MIME. - Articles and Papers [ Daniel Glazman 27-Oct-94 ] (In English): N.Borenstein, Bellcore, "Multimedia Mail From the Bottom Up or Teaching Dumb Mailers to Sing", ConneXions, pp. 10-16, Nov.91 G.Vaudreuil, CNRI, "MIME: Multi-Media, Multi-Lingual Extensions for RFC 822 Based Electronic Mail", ConneXions, pp. 36-39, Sep.92 (In French): D.Glazman, EDF/DER, "Les Extensions MIME", Tribunix No 57, Oct.94 -- 6) MIME based relays for commercial mail services ------------------------------------------------- 6.1) Large national or international providers { Lots missing here. Anyone got any info these, or any others? } { America On-line } { Dialog } { Genie } { MCI Mail } { Sprintmail } -------------------------------- 6.1.1) ATTMAIL [ Steve 30-Dec-1992 ] We do support binary attachment but are not MIME compliant nor do we have an X.400 to MIME conversion header routine. This is 'in the works', however, and due to overwhelming interest by our users and other prmd's, research and development are currently engaged in working on the issue. I do not have any information on when this will be available, but will let you know when I receive word of our MIME status. -------------------------------- 6.1.2) CompuServe [ Pat Farrell 31-Dec-1993 ] CompuServe's main mail service is ASCII text based, and is not MIME compliant. CompuServe provides robust, reliable mail transport of binary files. CompuServe invented and copyrighted the GIF format which is supported by MIME. There are commercial and freeware client programs for Macs and PCs that can provide "user friendly" access to CompuServe's text and binary mail services, display GIF files, and interact with CompuServe's forums. (CompuServe forums are roughly equivalent to USENET newsfeeds.) -------------------------------- 6.1.3) RadioMail [ Jerry Sweet 21-Mar-1994 ] RadioMail Corp. (formerly Anterior Technology) operates two types of e-mail services having these statuses with respect to MIME: 1. cc:Mail/Internet gatewaying. cc:Mail does permit binary attachments of various types, and these attachments are encoded by the gateway for transfer via SMTP, but the encoding is not presently MIME-compliant. This may change. 2. Wireless e-mail gatewaying. Because the RadioMail gateway passes a limited set of headers, MIME messages per se do not traverse the gateway intact. 7-bit-encoded MIME messages may traverse the gateway if encapsulated, e.g. using RFC 934. However, RadioMail does not presently supply MIME-compliant user agents for use on radio modem equipped MS-DOS and Macintosh computers. This will change. [ Mark Lovell 4-Jan-1995 ] The clients for both the Marco and the Envoy support a subset of MIME. They only support body-part types that they understand, since there is not a traditional OS on either unit. RadioMail has established a full set of MIME interface specifications, and future clients will be built to support them. { Should coordinate this with the global e-mail list that is posted to } { comp.mail.misc. } -------------------------------- 6.2) Local and regional providers { Any info? Should coordinate this with e.g. the PDIAL list. } -- End of Part 1 ************* -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,comp.answers,news.answers Path: news1.ucsd.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!library.ucla.edu!psgrain!news.uoregon.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!usenet.cis.ufl.edu!purdue!lerc.nasa.gov!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!usc!news.cerf.net!nntp2.cerf.net!shrike.irvine.com!jsweet From: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Subject: comp.mail.mime FAQ, part 2 of 3 (frequently asked questions list) Content-Type: message/partial; number=2; total=3; id="" References: Followup-To: comp.mail.mime Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Originator: jsweet@fester.irvine.com Sender: usenet@irvine.com (News Administration) Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: Irvine Compiler Corp., Irvine, California, USA Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 07:28:46 GMT Supersedes: Message-ID: Summary: This posting contains answers to some of the Frequently Asked Questions about MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Please read it before posting a question to comp.mail.mime. Expires: Mon, 1 Jan 1996 07:30:02 GMT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Lines: 2074 Xref: news1.ucsd.edu comp.mail.mime:6521 comp.answers:12713 news.answers:49133 Archive-Name: mail/mime-faq/part2 Version: $Id: mime2,v 3.14 1995/09/03 06:14:01 jsweet Rel $ Posting-Frequency: monthly -- ========================================================== comp.mail.mime frequently asked questions list (FAQ) (2/3) ========================================================== Part 2: MIME products ~~~~~~ -- Overview -------- This is part 2 of a Frequently Asked Questions document about MIME, the multipurpose and multi-media standard for Internet mail. Part 1 covers frequently asked questions. Part 2 is a listing of MIME products. Part 3 covers advanced topics. The usual disclaimers apply; you know what they are: no endorsements implied, no warranty, no safety, no nuthin'! :-) -- 7) Freely available MIME software packages ------------------------------------------ This section lists MIME-capable or MIME-enabling libraries, conversion tools, extension packages, mail user agents, and mail transport systems. Tools that are explicitly designed for handling MIME in USENET news are discussed in section 9, although many of the packages in this section also deal with USENET news. -------------------------------- 7.1) Libraries and Patches Name: c-client Product: MUA library code Platform: Unix, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Windows, TOPS-20, VAX/VMS Where: ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap.tar.Z Author: Mark Crispin Comments: [ comp.mail.misc FAQ ] Software writers only: c-client is a general library useful for creating MUA's. It provides a Application Program Interface for retrieving and manipulating mail messages. It supports the latest draft of MIME. It is driver based, and easily ported to new platforms and MTAs. The currently supported platforms include various versions of BSD and SysV Unix, MS-DOS, Macintosh and even TOPS-20(!). It supports mailboxes in various local file formats (e.g. Unix mbox, mail.txt, mh, mmdf), as well as remote mailbox access via the NNTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols. This is done transparently so the main program is normally not aware what kind of mailbox it is accessing. c-client does not contain any user interface. Rather, it contains everything else that goes into an MUA. c-client is called with such functions as mail_open(), mail_fetchheader(), mail_setflag(), etc. Just the thing if you want to write a new MUA. c-client is distributed as part of the University of Washington IMAP toolkit, and includes POP2, POP3, and IMAP2 (IMAP4 support is coming soon) client and server code. However, c-client does not require IMAP or POP, and can be built without these. Contact the author (Mark Crispin ) for technical questions. Name: FITS-v2 Product: xv patch Platform: Where: ftp://orangutan.cv.nrao.edu/pub/aips/xv/FITS-v2.tar.Z Author: [ Patrick P. Murphy 15-Nov-1994 ] This is a patch to xv that permits it to read and write FITS files. Granted it's probably not capable of digesting, say, a UV database from AIPS, but for most FITS images it seems to work reasonably well. I've used this to patch both xv versions 2 and 3 successfully. Were you to have this, it would then be possible to view the image by clicking on the URL/link, viewing it in xv, and then using xv's save function to save it to a local disk. I have not used this mode of operation extensively, and it's not at all clear how much of the header would be preserved beyond the bare essentials, but it's a start. If you just want "pretty pictures" it's definitely a good method. Another option would be to use the .mailcap to specify: image/fits; saoimage %s Sorry, I don't know how to make the system recognise a binary file, though I'm sure it's possible. Name: mimelite Product: library Platform: ANSI C Where: ftp://oslonett.no/Software/MsDos/Kommunikasjon/Offline/mimelt20.zip Where: ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/mail/mimelt20.zip Author: Gisle Hannemyr Comments: [ Gisle Hannemyr 20-May-1994 ] "mimelite" is a simple, lightweight library written in ANSI C that supports the parsing of MIME headers and encoding/decoding of body parts, suitable for inclusion in offline-readers. If you develop mail and newsreader software (user agents), you can link mimelite with your own program to make it support a significant subset of MIME (namely the Content-Transfer-Encodings 7BIT, 8BIT, BASE64 and QUOTED-PRINTABLE). mimelite also supports conversion between the ISO Latin 1 character set used for European character sets on USENET/Internet and PC-based character sets (e.g. Macintosh, IBM CP-437 and CP-850). The distribution archive also contains UNMIME, a standalone program to decode MIMEd messages encoded with BASE64 or QUOTED-PRINTABLE encoding. The mimelite library is general enough to work in a number of contexts, but it has been designed to work well on MS-DOS (where memory is a scarce resource). Its main application is intended to help extend MS-DOS-based "offline-readers" for RFC-822 and RFC-1036 conformant messages to also support RFC-1521 and RFC-1522. -------------------------------- 7.2) Conversion tools and extension packages Name: emil Product: tool Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/ Where: ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/unix/mail/emil/ Author: Martin Wendel Comments: [ Martin Wendel 8-Apr-1994 ] Emil is a tool for converting between message formats used by MIME, Eudora, SUN mailtool, PC and Mac based clients, etc. It is easily extensible. It can work either standalone, as an argument driven filter program, or, if linked with sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5 or sendmail-8.6.8, as a mail gateway convertering messages sent between various types of Internet mail clients. It will give a possibility to convert encoding formats of attachments and convert character sets of text. It can make a heterogenous mail environment, consisting of various types of mail clients, act as a homogenous environment; for instance sending only MIME based messages to the outside world. Name: encdec Product: tool Platform: ISO C Where: ftp://ftp.efd.lth.se/pub/mail/encdec.c-1.1.gz Author: Joergen Haegg Comments: encdec is a simple standalone encoder/decoder for base64 and quoted printable written in ISO C. Name: Enriched text valider Product: tool Platform: Unix (easily portable) Author: Daniel Glazman Contact: Daniel.Glazman@der.edf.fr Where: ftp://lara0.exp.edf.fr/pub/MIME/testEnriched.c [ Daniel Glazman 13-Oct-1994 ] This tool is a text/enriched valider useable in conjunction with the 'test' field of a mailcap file (for instance). Written in std C, its code has been made *very* simple and readable on purpose, even if it can be optimized. It detects unbalanced closing tags, illegal tags, tags longer than 60 chars and <<. Provided with the standard "as is" copyright notice. /*Enjoy !*/ Name: exmh Product: MUA Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/exmh/exmh-1.6.tar.Z Where: ftp://harbor.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/tcl/code/exmh-1.5.1.tar.gz Author: Contact: "Brent Welch" Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 13-Aug-1994 ] A Tk based UI to MH. Supports nested folders, MIME/metamail. [ Achim Bohnet 15-May-1995 ] Because exmh is always being updated, check for more recent versions in this location: ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/exmh/ Exmh supports these features: - PGP - xface - embedded URLs - glimpse full text search - extensive user configurability and extensibility The exmh home page may be found at this URL: http://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/exmh/html/index.html There are three exmh-related mailing lists: 1. For new exmh version announcements, write to: exmh-announce-request@parc.xerox.com Put this in the body: subscribe exmh-announce you@your.host 2. To join the exmh discussion list, write to: exmh-users-request@parc.xerox.com Put this in the body: subscribe exmh-users you@your.host 3. To join the exmh developers list, write to: exmh-workers-request@parc.xerox.com Put this in the body: subscribe exmh-workers you@your.host For mailing list archives, see ftp://parcftp.xerox.com:/pub/exmh/archive Files are in MH "packf" format, compressed. An html-ized archive of the exmh lists and related mailing lists (mh-users/workers, glimpse) is at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/~ach/exmh/archive/ The 3rd Edition of Jerry Peek's "MH & xmh" book from O'Reilly & Associates includes chapters about exmh. See also the USENET newsgroup "comp.mail.mh". Name: metamail Product: MUA and tools Platform: Unix Amiga MS-DOS Where: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/mm2.7.tar.Z The metamail distribution that Nathaniel Borenstein supports. Where: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/contrib2.7.tar.Z Contributed sources. Where: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/mm2.7.dos.zip MS-DOS binaries Author: Nathaniel Borenstein Comments: [ Paul Eggert ] Metamail is a software implementation of MIME, designed for easy integration with traditional mail-reading interfaces -- typically, users do not invoke metamail directly. Ideally, extending the local e-mail or news system to handle a new media format is a simple matter of adding a line to a mailcap file. Mailcap files are described in RFC 1343. [ Nathaniel Borenstein 9-Jan-1993 ] The metamail distribution includes a simple "mailserver" shell script that can be used to operate a MIME-conformant mail server mechanism, e.g. for making anon-ftp files available as MIME mail. ServiceMail is also now available under the "contrib" area of the metamail distribution. [ Jerry Sweet 10-Oct-1994 ] The "richtext" program in the metmail distribution has an undocumented command line option, "-e", which turns it into a viewer for text/enriched, the successor to text/richtext. Name: Mew (Message interface to Emacs Window) Product: MUA Platform: Emacs/Mule/XEmacs Where: ftp://ftp.csce.kyushu-u.ac.jp/pub/Misc/mew/mew-current.tar.gz Author: Kazuhiko YAMAMOTO Comments: [ Kazuhiko YAMAMOTO 14-Oct-1994 ] Mew (Message interface to Emacs Window) is a message interface to Emacs/Mule that integrates structured message such as MIME, PEM, and PGP. Mew is now based on MH but will support USENET news soon. Currently, following features are supported. * Selective MIME part viewer. * User friendly MIME composer that maps directory structure to multipart. * PEM auto decryption and functions for encrypting and signing. * PGP auto decryption and functions for encrypting and singing. * LRU message cache engine. * Only SPC key press interface. * Asynchronous inc and scan. * Dynamic window configuration. * Excellent refile folder guess algorithm. * Alias completion and expansion. * Easy pick and scan interface. * Mark based functions that treats multiple messages(e.g. unshar, uumerge). You should pronouns "Mew" as it is. Of course, it is meow of cat. P.S. You can find PEM/PGP/MIME integration information on 00faq in Mew's package. Name: MHonArc Product: HTML conversion tool Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/dtd2html/MHonArc1.0.0.tar.gz Author: Earl Hood [ Earl Hood 2-Oct-1994 ] MHonArc is a Perl program for converting e-mail messages as specified in RFC 822 and RFC 1521 (MIME) to HTML. MHonArc can perform the following tasks: * Convert mh(1) mail folders or mail(1) style mailboxes into an HTML mail archive. * Add new e-mail messages to an existing HTML mail archive generated by MHonArc. * Convert a single message to HTML. An index page is created when an archive is generated. MHonArc allows complete customization over the appearance of the index page including the ability to insert user defined HTML markup and content-type sensitive icons for the mail messages processed. For details refer to http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.doc.html The x-types handled by MHonArc are listed in section 3 of this FAQ. Name: MIME for VM/CMS Product: Platform: VM/CMS Where: gopher://ricevm1.rice.edu Author: Comments: [ Rick Troth 21-Jul-1993 ] This MIME decoder is available via Gopher from ricevm1.rice.edu under "Other freely distributable CMS software", which is under "CMS Gopher Software". It correctly reads: o text/plain, o text/richtext, and o image/gif. GIFs require the VMGIF package from Belgium. I need filters for PBM and PGM and then they'd work too. Sounds are not useful on the standard 3270 terminal (dumb terminals just don't play sounds). It splits out multipart/[anything] into separate files. CMS has a standard directory "browser" (FILELIST) that lets you view a bunch of related files and decide what, if anything, you want to do with them. Message/external-body doesn't work well, but probably will given more development time. I could use some samples to help with the debugging of that part. It does NOT do applications, except for the one, octet-stream. (which is treated as a kind-of "sendfile" utility) There *is* a PostScript interpreter for CMS, but it is reported to be a dog (we don't have it). But I do hope to put the extraction code in for these eventually. If a given content-type isn't understood, you just view the item as-is. For composition, there's no CHARSET= parameter on the Content-Type: text/plain line. It's EBCDIC until it gets into SMTP, then it's ASCII, then it might be anything, so I've left off the CHARSET= parameter. An "attach" command is added to RiceMAIL when you run this, which would then change the message from text/plain to multipart/mixed and append the attachment after a boundary. Attachments don't "close" properly; that is, the final boundary isn't correct, but is correctly processed by all of the MIME compliant readers I've checked. (there's some feature of RiceMAIL that causes this) This thing is based on CMS Pipelines, so adding features is easy since we now have the base for MIME processing. Name: MIME tools for GNU Emacs Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.kyutech.ac.jp/pub/MultiMedia/mime/emacs-mime-tools.shar Author: Masanobu UMEDA Comments: [ Masanobu UMEDA 07-Aug-1993 ] MIME tools that consist of "mime.el", "rmailmime.el" and "metamail.el" are tools for reading and composition of MIME messages for GNU Emacs and its variants. "mime.el" is a simple MIME message composer that works with mail mode, news mode, and mhe letter mode. Messages of plain and richtext text, audio, and image, and multipart messages of them can be composed by using "mime.el". "rmailmime.el" is for reading MIME messages within Rmail. "metamail.el" is an interface to metamail. The metamail package is required by these tools. Name: MIME tools for NeXT Product: editor Platform: NeXT Where: Author: Dave Lacey Comments: [ Dave Lacey ] I'd like to keep you apprised of some MIME work I'm doing. I'm interested in using MIME as a transport medium for multi-media gopher documents. My particular use is for Radiology info, but it would work for just about anything. I've got a NeXT Gopher client almost working and I also have a NeXT based MIME file editor that reads/creates MIME documents. Both work, but need a bit more extension. I will likely distribute the source to this, so the MIME reader (which is essentially an object) can be re-used in other apps. Name: mpack Product: MUA/utility Platform: Unix, MS-DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, Amiga, Archimedes Contact: mpack-bugs@andrew.cmu.edu Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-src.tar.Z Sources for all versions Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack15d.zip MS-DOS binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack15o.zip OS/2 binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-mac.hqx Macintosh binary Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-amiga.lha Amiga binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-arc.arc Archimedes binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-linux.tar.gz Linux binaries Author: John Gardiner Myers, Chris Newman (Mac), Mike Meyer (Amiga), Peter Simons (Amiga), Jochen Friedrich (OS/2), Olly Betts (Archimedes) Comments: [ John Gardiner Myers 16-Feb-1995 ] Mpack is a minimal implementation of MIME, designed for encoding and decoding binary files in MIME messages. In short, it is the MIME equivalent of uuencode and uudecode. For backwards compatibility, it can also decode messages in split-uuencoded format. The Macintosh port can also handle AppleSingle, AppleDouble, and BinHex. Starting with version 1.5, all official mpack distributions are PGP signed by "John Gardiner Myers ". The PGP signatures are detached from the distributions themselves, in files with the ".asc" filename extension. [ Arjan van der Meer 30-Jan-1995 ] There is now a version of mpack/munpack for the Atari ST and compatibles. It is just a compiled version of the UNIX 1.2 version, but what I've tried worked okay. It is made by alex@hal.rhein-main.de. MPACK/MUNPACK Atari ST binary - ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/atari/misc/mpack_12.lzh Name: n2m Product: conversion tool Platform: NeXT Where: ftp://nexus.yorku.ca/pub/n2m.shar Author: Comments: [ Dave Collier-Brown 04-Jan-1993 ] Nn2m is a program that converts a file containing a NeXT-format multimedia message into a file containing a MIME-format multimedia message. It is usable on Berkeley-derived systems, or ones otherwise using /usr/lib/sendmail as a mail transfer agent. It is in use on SunOS 4.1.1 and Ultrix 4.2, tested briefly on Aix 3.2 and NeXT. Description: it is used with non-NeXT mail user agents to convert NeXT mail to MIME, which is intelligible to more than just the NeXT mail program. The resulting file will usually be more intelligible to non-multimedia mail user agents. The textual part of the mail is converted into text, as well as Microsoft RTF, and the attachments follow, as text/plain wherever possible, as base64 encoded binaries otherwise. This suffices for messages with ASCII files pasted into them. Caveat: This is a converter, not a translator: the conversion of sound and of the initial "index.rft" file is not correctness- preserving. Name: Safe-TCL (Enabled Mail) Product: extension package Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mrose/safe-tcl/safe-tcl.tar.Z Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mrose/safe-tcl/safe-tcl-contrib.tar.Z Author: Marshall T. Rose, Nathaniel Borenstein Contact: safe-tcl-request@uunet.uu.net Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 13-Aug-1994 ] Incoming email processing tool based on Tcl. Software also available which can build MIME messages and send them. Incoming email processing includes ability to execute encapsulated Tcl programs at delivery or upon viewing. [ Jerry Sweet 5-Sep-1994 ] Papers about Enabled Mail and Safe-TCL are available from these sources: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/st/em-model.txt ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/st/safe-tcl.ps ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/st/safe-tcl.txt Name: sd-launch Product: extension package Platform: Where: http://www.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/CCS/people/fenner/dist/sd-launch/ Where: ftp://ee.lbl.gov/conferencing/sd/ Where: ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/net-research/ Author: Contact: fenner@cmf.nrl.navy.mil (William C. Fenner) Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 27-Feb-1995 ] This is a MIME/WWW browser helper to launch MBONE sessions. Name: ServiceMail Product: toolset Platform: unknown Where: ftp://eitech.com Author: Enterprise Integration Technologies Corporation Contact: servicemail-help@eitech.com Comments: [ Jay C. Weber 13-Oct-1992 ] We (Enterprise Integration Technologies Corporation) have a MIME implementation, which we are distributing freely. Instead of a MIME MUA, it is a toolkit for building services that automatically process MIME messages. It is similar, in spirit, to the few other e-mail-scripting packages except: o it exploits several MIME features o it is intended to run standalone (as opposed to a back-end to a MUA) o it uses TCL (from Berkeley) as its scripting language and support for PEM is in the works. EIT is providing ServiceMail access to the ServiceMail toolkit. If you have the METAMAIL or some other MIME-compliant mail reader, just send the message To: services@eitech.com Subject: archive-request servicemail.tar.Z and read the response(s) using METAMAIL. Save the result in servicemail.tar.Z The package can also be retrieved by anonymous FTP from the site eitech.com. If you have any problems with acquisition, installation, or use, don't hesitate to send mail to "servicemail-help@eitech.com" and ask for help. IF YOU WANT FUTURE UPDATES ON TOOL KIT VERSIONS, BUGS, AND SERVICES, MAKE SURE YOU ARE ON THE PACT-KIT MAILING LIST. To get on it, send a message to "services@eitech.com" with subject "listserv subscribe pact-kit your-real-name". Name: sun-to-mime Product: conversion tool Platform: OpenWindows Where: ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.perl Where: ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.c Author: Keith Moore Comments: [ Keith Moore 27-Dec-1992 ] A perl script (and conversion to C of same) that converts OpenWindows mail to MIME. Body parts currently supported are: text, gif, Sun rasterfile (converted to image/gif), postscript, and audio. Other types default to application/octet-stream. It's easy to extend the set of types supported and to add conversions, if necessary. The script requires uuencode, uudecode, zcat (aka uncompress), and the "convert" program from ImageMagick. If you don't have ImageMagick you can probably substitute the pbm stuff with little fuss. Name: uu-to-mime Product: conversion tool Platform: perl Where: ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/uu-to-mime.perl Author: Keith Moore Comments: A perl script that translates an RFC 822 message containing a single uuencoded file to a MIME message containing a base64-encoded file. -------------------------------- 7.3) Mail user agents and transport systems Name: Andrew Product: Multimedia system Platform: Unix Where: Author: Comments: [ Susan Straub 11-Jan-1993 ] Andrew is a very large and ambitious software system developed at Carnegie Mellon University. It is installed at hundreds of sites throughout the world, and includes a multimedia document editor, help system, and various other utilities. In particular, it includes a feature-rich program, "messages", which can read and send mail and news articles in MIME format, including images, audio, richtext, and more. Andrew is available in binary release for several Unix system architectures, and also in source form. Be warned that the source distribution is itself about 50 megabytes, but you really are getting a LOT of stuff. For information on how to obtain a copy of Andrew, send mail to info-andrew-request@andrew.cmu.edu. Name: elm Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: Author: Comments: [ Syd Weinstein 21-Dec-1992 ] Elm support for MIME: 2.3 - uses metamail supplied patch from Nathaniel Borenstein. 2.4: reading: detects MIME headers and calls metamail automatically if the message cannot be displayed on the current screen using the native capabilities of the display (recognizes some char sets as native) sending: detects [include ] markers and makes them MIME attachments. Still very 'crude', but its all we had time for, as to the release deadline of 'Elm' and MIME. 3.x: reading: probably no change from 2.x, but will understand some 'file storage' types and allow for splitting off attachments on their own. sending: will allow defining attachments to be added and auto build the MIME stuff, in addition to the [include ] syntax. release status: 2.3: obsolete 2.4: Current PL is 23. 3.x: not planned until some time in 1994. [ Sven Guckes 18-Apr-1995 ] > 2.4: Current PL is 23. Make that "PL24". > 3.x: not planned until some time in 1994. Make that "1995". Or even "1996". Name: Eudora 1.4.4 Product: MUA Platform: Macintosh MS-Windows Where: ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/windows/1.4/eudor144.exe Where: ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/mac/1.4/eudora144.hqx Where: ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/systems/ibmpc/windows3/winsock/eudora14.exe Author: Steve Dorner Author: Jeff Beckley (Windows Version) Comments: Eudora 1.4 is a MUA for Macs and PCs that uses POP3 and SMTP and supports MIME. A commercial version is also available: see the next section. [ "Where" info from Lourdes Yero 15-May-1995 ] Name: HUyMail Product: MTA/MUA Platform: VMS Where: ftp://ftp.technion.ac.il/pub/unsupported/vms/local/local/huymail*.bck Author: Yehavi Bourvine Comments: [ Yehavi Bourvine 22-Jul-1993 ] HUyMailer is a store and forward mailer for VAX/VMS and AXP/VMS systems which supports as transports: DECnet, Multinet/TcpIp, HUJI-NJE and PMDF. The software is available freely for non-commercial use as a C source code. The mailer supports two users' interfaces: VMS/MAIL (to which the connection is done via MAIL11 DECnet connection) or a locally written interface called BMAIL. BMAIL is a menu oriented interface which supports MIME and Hebrew. Name: Iride Product: MUA Platform: Macintosh Where: ftp://gnbts.univ.trieste.it/mime/Iride.sea.hqx Author: GNBTS Comments: [ From the README ] Iride is (or will be -- it's currently in beta test) an implementation of a MIME user agent on the Apple Macintosh computer. It was developed as part of a project of the GNBTS - Gruppo Nazionale Bioingegneria sezione di Trieste, for the integration of multimedia mail with hospital data storing facilities, in particular for the transfer of bioimages. This is a far from a complete MIME implementation, but I think it is quite usable. To use it you need: o Macintosh with MacTCP 1.1 or better installed o 32 bit ColorQuickDraw if you want to use images o audio input device if you want to create audio messages o connection to a SMTP mail relay o connection to a POP3 server MIME types supported: text/plain charset=US-ASCII only text/richtext (no tool for composing richtext yet) audio/basic audio/X-macaudio generated when a NOT sampled audio pasted in image/GIF image/X-macPICT generated when color QuickDraw is missing only multipart/mixed each part is shown in a different window MUST change this multipart/parallel multipart/alternative handled as multipart/mixed MUST change this Name: mercurius Product: MUA Platform: Where: ftp://ftp.lii.unitn.it/pub/mercurius/mercurius.tar.Z Author: Contact: mercurius-bugs@lii.unitn.it Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 13-Aug-1994 ] Mercurius facilitates composing and reading multimedia electronic messages compliant with the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Name: MEUF [Mail Extended Using Faces] Product: MUA Platform: Unix/X Where: ftp://ftp.inria.fr Where: ftp://ftp.enst.fr Contact: Daniel.Glazman@der.edf.fr Author: Daniel Glazman Comments: [ Daniel Glazman 23-Sep-1994 ] Meuf is a student project I developed at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications de Paris with the System staff. It has grown A LOT to become a MIME-native MUA running under Xt/Xaw. Earlier non-MIME versions (1.3 and 1.4) are available by anonymous ftp from ftp.inria.fr and ftp.enst.fr. Currently developed version 3.0 will be released as a freely available product as soon as I'll get the authorization. Code has features: Pure MUA features: * Faces (48x48 XBM bitmaps) display using the X-Faces header field and included logos distribution * does not rely on "faces" package * folders (also with Faces display) * waste basket * messages sort by date, subject, length, ... * unlimited aliases * .face, .signature, .prologue, /usr/games/fortune handling * automagically deleted messages * References, Priority, Bcc, Return-Receipt-To handling * "Trusted Users" features * ignored header fields * online help * drag and drop for messages/folders management * interactive Face design * "Properties" windows MIME features: * does not rely on "metamail" package * full MIME composition and restitution for non-textual parts and text/plain * multiparts composition and restitution * basic text/richtext and text/enriched restitution * mailcap mechanism * Sun-Attachments parsing * MIME incorporation * MIME-clipboard (copy/paste of MIME parts between messages) * extraction of forwarded MIME-messages for MIME restitution * User's Guide (PS), Admin. Guide (PS) Successfully compiled and used with: Sun SunOs 4.1.x and Solaris 2.x HP 9000/7xx HP-UX > 9.01 DECstation Ultrix IBM RS6000 AIX > 3.2.4 Convex More information at http://lara0.exp.edf.fr/glazman/meuf.html Availability will be announced in comp.mail.mime newsgroup. Name: MH 6.8 Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/mh/mh-6.8.tar.Z Where: ftp://louie.udel.edu/portal/mh-6.8.tar.Z Author: Comments: MIME support is available for the MH message handling system; the primary reader and generator is the program mhn(1) although other MH programs are also changed. The current release of MH is 6.8.3. Mhn does not use the mailcap mechanism described in RFC 1343. Instead, it has its own flexible extension mechanism, called a profile. A tutorial for mhn is available: Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.tex.Z ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.sty.Z ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.ps.Z See the newsgroup comp.mail.mh for further information. Name: MIXMH Product: MUA Platform: Unix with X Where: ftp://aun.uninett.no/pub/mail/mixmh/mixmh-0.3.tar.Z Author: Comments: [ Harald Tveit Alvestrand 10-Dec-1992 ] This version is based on XMH version 1.6 from SEI, Carnegie Mellon. It supports sending MIME with extended character sets in the headers (per RFC 1342) and the body (per RFC 1341 text/plain). It has limited support for multipart messages. The source is freely redistributable and modifiable. As you can see from the version number, it is still not considered fully stable. Bugs may be reported to mixmh-bugs@uninett.no Information and discussion will take place on mixmh-info@uninett.no; mail to mixmh-info-request@uninett.no to join. Name: Pegasus mail Product: MUA Platform: MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Macintosh Where: ftp://risc.ua.edu/pub/network/pegasus/* Author: David Harris Comments: [ James Ford 2-Nov-1993 ] Pegasus Mail is an E-Mail package for Novell network v2.15 and higher that supports MHS (natively) and SMTP. The MS-DOS version (v3.01a) is MIME compliant; the MS-Windows version should be by mid-November. I do not know the timetable for the Mac version. You can either get a PC-based SMTP gateway for it (Charon, by Brad Clements) or a (Netware v3.11) NLM-based version (Mercury, by David Harris) from risc.ua.edu. I believe that the SMTP gateway Mercury supports 8-bit MIME encoding. [ Henning Stams 21-Nov-1994 ] MS-DOS-Version currently is 3.22. It's internationalized (German, Czech, Dutch and many more). Windows-Version is currently 1.22; v2.0 soon to come. Also Mime-compliant MERCURY runs on NW 3.11, 3.12, 4.x (Currently Bindery Emul. Mode; soon in NDS-Mode). Current Version: 1.13 Name: Pine Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine.tar.Z Author: Laurence Lundblade, Michael Seibel, Mark Crispin Comments: [ From the release notes 21-Sep-1993 ] Pine(tm) --a Program for Internet News & E-Mail-- is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. It was designed specifically with novice computer users in mind, but can be tailored to accommodate the needs of "power users" as well. Pine uses Internet message protocols (e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, NNTP) and runs on Unix and MS-DOS. The guiding principles for Pine's user-interface were: careful limitation of features, one-character mnemonic commands, always-present command menus, immediate user feedback, and high tolerance for user mistakes. It is intended that Pine can be learned by exploration rather than reading manuals. Feedback from the University of Washington community and a growing number of Internet sites has been encouraging. Pine's message composition editor, Pico, is also available as a separate stand-alone program. Pico is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker. [ David L Miller 31-Aug-1994 ] For more information, see http://www.cac.washington.edu/pine/ Name: Tkmailto Product: MUA Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://harbor.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/tcl/code/tkmailto-1.0.tar.gz Author: Contact: "Johan Lindbladh" Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" , 13-Aug-1994 ] Alpha version Tk-based mail composer which supports MIME. Requires Safe-Tcl 1.1. -- 8) Commercial MIME software packages ------------------------------------ Name: Echelon Product: MUA Platform: NEXTSTEP Contact: ak272@freenet.acsu.buffalo.edu Author: Doug Boyce Comments: Echelon is a MUA for NEXTSTEP that can decode, display, and compose both NeXTmail and MIME. Most MIME types are supported. A demo version is available from Where: ftp://nova.cc.purdue.edu/pub/next/submissions/Echelon_1.12.tar.gz Name: ECSMail Product: MUA/MTA Platform: Unix, NT, OS/2, OpenVMS, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Mac System 7 Contact: ECS Sales Phone: +1 403 420 8081 Author: Comments: [ Steve Hole 24-Aug-1993 ] ECSMail is an electronic mail product for building enterprise mail systems. It is designed from start to finish as a system for establishing mail services throughout an organization, with external organizations and the world information system in general. It does this by using a completely standards based architecture. ECSMail is comprised of the following system components: ECSMail MUA Set - a set of Mail User Agents (MUA) ECSMail MTA Set - a set of Message Transport Agents (MTA) ECSMail MS Set - a set of Message Services (MS) All components support both MIME/822 and X.400, and run under Unix, Microsoft NT, OS/2, OpenVMS. Additionally, the MUA Set runs under MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac System 7. Pricing for the ECS products and ISA business information can be obtained by contacting: ECS Sales 835 10040 - 104 Street Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 0Z2 Phone: 403-420-8081 Fax: 403-420-8037 or by sending a request through electronic mail to the address: ECS Sales Name: E-Mail Connection 2.5.03 Product: MUA Platform: Microsoft Windows Where: http://www.connectsoft.com/products/free_emc25.shtml Contact: ConnectSoft Comments: [ "Daniel J. Trentman" 16-Jul-1995 ] The following introduced it to me: ------- From yxiao@econ.lsa.umich.edu (Yuan Xiao) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: a very very good e-mail program Date: 13 Jul 1995 22:03:44 GMT I'm wondering why nobody has mentioned E-Mail Connection 2.5.03 from ConnectSoft. The commercial version is an award-winning all-purposed e-mail program that can send e-mail to internet, AOL, CompuServe, etc. Now they are giving away a version of this program for free! It has all features of the commercial version but can only send internet e-mail (but I think many people only need to send internet e-mail). It has MIME, automatically records sender's address in your address book, has a spell checker, rules to sort incoming mail, folders, drag and drop, two modes of operation (one for novices with help and one for experts), automatic checking incoming mail on server at scheduled time interval, etc. Above all, it has the most beautiful interface I've ever seen in an e-mail program (except for that e-mail program in the movie "Disclosure". I'm wondering does such a thing exist or is anybody going to write one?). You can even set a wallpaper in the program window. It certainly beats Eudora (the freeware version. Of course, it beats any commercial program by price) in terms of features and interface. It's as easy to use. It's superior to Pegasus in terms of interface and ease of use. I don't know how it compares to Pegasus in terms of feature but it does include all the features an average user will ever need. It's such a pleasure to use this program that I find I'm sending much more e-mails after I acquired this program! - -Aaron ------- Name: Eudora 2.0.2 Product: MUA Platform: Macintosh Contact: eudora-sales@qualcomm.com Author: Steve Dorner Author: Jeff Beckley (Windows Version) Comments: Commercial versions of Eudora with more features than the freely available ones. Information about the commercial versions of Eudora can be found at: ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/windows/Eudor2Info-*.exe ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/mac/Eudora2Info-*.sea.hqx Name: IBM multimedia mail Product: Platform: OS/2 Contact: Jerry Cuomo Author: IBM Comments: [ Larry Salomon Jr 10-Dec-1992 ] I'm not going to follow this group, but I wanted to state that IBM - at the T.J. Watson Research Center - is developing a multimedia mail application for OS/2 which is based on the Mime spec. They demoed it at Interop. For more information, including (probably) how to become a test site (I haven't confirmed whether they're actually going to do this, but they've done it before), contact the department manager, Jerry Cuomo, at gcuomo@watson.ibm.com. Name: iGate Product: WordPerfect Office gateway Platform: Contact: smart@actrix.gen.nz Author: Smart Systems Comments: [ Quentin Smart 25-Sep-1993 ] iGate provides seamless connectivity to SMTP mail from WordPerfect office. Running as a native gateway under the Office Connection server and incorporting a TCP/IP stack iGate is a complete solution with no extras like MHS or TCP/IP stacks required. Further information from: Smart Systems PO Box 5017 Wellington, New Zealand +64 6 3561484 smart@actrix.gen.nz Name: Internet Exchange for cc:Mail Product: cc:Mail to SMTP/MIME Internet Mail Gateway Platform: MS-Windows Contact: sales@ima.com Phone: +1 415 871 4045 Author: International Messaging Associates Comments: [ Tim Kehres 08-Dec-1993 ] For cc:Mail users, Internet Exchange is the gateway of choice to provide standardized full multimedia connectivity between cc:Mail users and their Internet partners. Internet Exchange for cc:Mail can be used to interconnect cc:Mail networks with external users on the Internet as well as connecting your own internal network to your cc:Mail community. Internet Exchange for cc:Mail is the first SMTP to cc:Mail gateway that suports the full MIME Internet standard for exchanging rich media multipart messages. This means that your cc:Mail users can now exchange any attachment types with Internet based mail systems. By using the MIME standard, Internet Exchange for cc:Mail users will be assured future compatibility with other MIME compliant mail gateways. To simplify administration and management, the Internet Exchange System Manager runs under Windows 3.1. On screen buttons provide administration access into the gateway operations. Managers can easily view and modify all gateway activity. Message routing is accomplished using any combination of host tables,Domain Name System (DNS) lookup, and default mail host routing. Name: InterOFFICE Product: Multiplatform MTA and gateway for most email systems Platform: UNIX, OS/2, VAX/VMS, Tandem NonStop, NeXTSTEP, HP 3000, AS/400, VM/370, Wang VS Contact: info@bsw.com Phone: +1 617 482 9898 Author: The Boston Software Works, Inc. Comments: [ Larry Campbell 28-Jan-1995 ] InterOFFICE is a portable and modular family of gateway modules (access units, we call 'em) that interconnect a wide variety of email systems, including: ALL-IN-1, cc:Mail, HP Desk, HP OpenMail, IBM OfficeVision/400, IBM OfficeVision/VM (formerly known as PROFS), Microsoft Mail, NeXTMAIL, Novell MHS, QuickMail, Tandem TRANSFER, Wang OFFICE, X.400, and of course, Internet mail. The Internet access unit fully supports MIME, enabling users of proprietary email systems to exchange multipart messages containing text, images, audio, and binary files with Internet users. Name: Ishmail Product: MUA Platform: SunOS, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and UnixWare Contact: info@hal.com Phone: +1 800 762 0253 or +1 512 834 9962 Where: ftp://ftp.halsoft.com Pricing: $99 U.S. for single user. Multi-user/site license discounts. Author: HaL Software Systems Comments: [ Frank Bieser 21-Jun-1994 ] Ishmail is a MIME-capable e-mail tool with a Motif graphical user interface. Ishmail includes the following features: - Full support of MIME data types: plain text, rich text, GIF, JPEG, U-LAW audio, MPEG, binary, PostScript, ODA, RFC822 mail message, plus user-defined extensions. - Message attachments supported via: local file, AFS, mail server, regular FTP, anonymous FTP, and TFTP. - Support for composing, viewing, and printing rich text messages. - Easily customized through GUI dialogs for fonts, definition and placement of custom buttons, message list sorting and format, etc. - Variety of user interaction methods, ranging from "drag and drop" and custom buttons to keyboard shortcuts. - Support for use of, modification, and addition of sendmail-style mail aliases. - User defined alert commands and icons, triggered by matching patterns in incoming mail headers. - On-line help cards, including context sensitive help. - Full end-user manual provided in PostScript format. - Complete hypertext version of end-user manual available via World Wide Web at http://www.hal.com/products/sw/ishmail/user-guide.html HaL Software Systems 3006 Longhorn Blvd #A-113 Austin, TX 78758-7631 Name: Mail 3.3 Product: MUA Platform: NEXTSTEP Contact: Lennart Lovstrand Author: NeXT Computer, Inc. Phone: +1 800-TRY-NeXT, +1 415-366-0900 Comments: [ Lennart Lovstrand 28-Feb-1995 ] Mail 3.3 is an easy-to-use multimedia graphical mail user interface that can send and receive messages in both NeXTmail or MIME format. It has support for hierarchical mailboxes, address books, "Lip Service" voice mail and a bunch of other stuff. Mail 3.3 comes as part of the NEXTSTEP 3.3 User System available for NeXT Computers, 486-based PCs, HP, and SPARC based workstations. Name: Mail*Hub Product: Platform: Control Data 4000 Series Mips-based Unix systems Contact: rrr@svl.cdc.com Author: Control Data Systems Comments: [ 23-Dec-1992 ] Mail*Hub includes support for X.400, X.500, SMTP, and creating, viewing, and sending MIME enclosures in mail. In addition, the Fax Gateway portion of Mail*Hub supports sending mail with MIME enclosures to a Fax machine. Graphical MIME components (Postscript, GIF, TIFF,...) are automatically recognized and imaged at the receiving Fax machine. Name: MAIL-IT Product: MUA Platform: MS Windows 3.x Contact: mail-it@unipalm.co.uk Phone: 1-800-368-0312 (+44) 223 250 100 Author: Unipalm Ltd. Comments: [ Maria Porto , 7-Jul-1994 ] MAIL-IT is a Winsock-compatible SMTP/POP mail client with MIME functionality. By implementing Microsoft's Extended MAPI architecture, MAIL-IT allows mail to be sent from directly within MAPI-enabled applications such as Word for Windows, Excel, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and Ami Pro, thus Internet-enabling the user's desktop. MAIL-IT benefits include: - support for MIME - implementation of Microsoft's MAPI architecture - full drag and drop - hierarchical foldering - uses SMTP for sending, and POP2 or POP3 for receiving mail - local address book There is a 30-day demo copy available for anonymous ftp: ftp://pipe.pipex.net/xtech/mail-it/mie202.zip Please contact us for the decrypting password. Name: Mail*Link SMTP for QuickMail, Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk, and PowerShare Product: Macintosh Mail systems to SMTP/MIME gateways Platform: Macintosh Contact: info@starnine.com Phone: 510-649-4949 Author: StarNine Technologies, Inc. Comments: [David Thompson 19-Sept-1994 ] Mail*Link SMTP 3.0 is the industry-standard for connecting Macintosh mail systems to each other, as well as PC, UNIX and host-based mail systems on corporate LANs and the Internet. The Mail*Link family of gateways now provides MIME support for all major Macintosh LAN messaging systems including QuickMail, Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk and PowerShare Collaboration servers. Per-destination processing of messages in version 3.0 allows gateway administrators to configure translation and enclosure handling methods for outgoing messages addressed to a specific SMTP address, domain, or host. The gateway ships with three preprogrammed translation methods for sending messages to users on PCs, UNIX, and MIME-capable systems. Mail*Link SMTP uses the proposed MacMIME standard to allow more flexibility when receiving messages with MIME-encoded Macintosh files. An option to encode an attachment's datafork only with MIME greatly increases compatibility with non-Macintosh MIME systems. Other enclosure handling options include MacBinary-UUENCODE, AppleSingle-UUENCODE, BinHex 4.0, and Datafork-only-UUENCODE, and StuffIt compression. Name: Mail*Link Internet for PowerTalk Product: PowerTalk to SMTP/MIME Internet Mail Gateway Platform: Macintosh System 7.5 Contact: info@starnine.com Phone: 510-649-4949 Author: StarNine Technologies, Inc. Comments: [David Thompson 19-Sept-1994 ] Mail*Link Internet for PowerTalk is a personal gateway that allows System 7.5 users in SMTP/POP3 environments to exchange messages with Internet mail users. Version 1.0 supports System 7.5 and System 7 Pro Macintoshes with MacTCP (included) on a local area network. It uses the standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol (POP3) for sending and reading mail within the LAN. If the LAN is connected to the Internet, PowerTalk users can also exchange messages with external Internet users. Version 1.5, due out in September, 1994 will support SLIP or PPP connections. Incoming Internet messages are placed in the PowerTalk universal mailbox on the desktop. Users can send Internet messages from within their preferred PowerTalk-savvy application such as WordPerfect, ClarisWorks, or the Finder. The gateway supports standard Macintosh file enclosure handling methods including AppleSingle-UUEncode, Datafork only-UUENCODE, MacBinary, and BinHex, as well as MIME. A 60-day trial version of the gateway is available on StarNine's anonymous FTP server (ftp://ftp.starnine.com/pub/evals/pt-inet) as well as on the CD-ROM version of Apple's System 7.5 product (look in the CD Extras folder). Name: Mi'Mail Product: MUA Platform: MS Windows 3.x Contact: info@irisoft.be Phone: +32 16 23 23 01 Author: IRISoft Research Comments: [ Jean-Louis Herman 12-Apr-1995 ] Mi'Mail is a electronic mail product with: - Full MIME support (Nested multiparts, Message/Partial,...). - Distributed address books. - Connection with X500 for getting electronic addresses. - Distributed, hierarchical and open folder system (folders contain messages but also any kind of document, any application can get the information stored in the folders). - User friendly interface (drag and drop, context sensitive help, powerful editor). - Uses SMTP and POP3 over TCP or over serial lines with modems. - Automatic solution for managing the compatibility between MIME and non MIME users. - DDE server (with the same interface as cc:mail). - Transparent support of ISO 8859 character sets. - Easy management of the attachments (use of the Windows registration database, drag and drop,..) - Automatic mail checking, sendmail acknowledgment support, Multi-user application. An evaluation version is available at the following site: ftp://ftp.eunet.be/pub/EUnet/dos Name: MMail Product: MUA Platform: SunOS, Solaris Contact: mmail@atelier.demon.co.uk Author: Atelier de Software Ltd. Comments: [ "Dr. Martin R. Raskovsky" 18-Jul-1995 ] MMail: a WYSIWYG text composition, visualization and MIME mailer. - Text organized in different fonts. - Inline images (images mixed with text) Works on Sun/SPARC with: Operating System: SunOS 4.1.2 or greater, Solaris 2.1 or greater Window Manager: X11, OpenLook, Motif Free full functionality evaluation available via FTP. MMail - Features: WYSIWYG full text composition and visualization. (MIME/text/enriched or MIME/application/MMail) Text Organization: Adjust to margins Line attributes (Left, Center, Right, Spread, Fixed) Images mixed within text delivered as multipart/mixed IMAP2 interface (and IMAP4 when it becomes available) Hyphenation (in 17 different languages) Spell (via Unix spell) Multiple fonts (ISO-8859-1) MIME/attachments via mailcap to viewer Alias and Group Mail Box Filing/Editing Ignored unwanted headers Automatic File Carbon Copy File Include (signature, template, image) Message Find/Sort/Move/Delete/Undelete/History Data Base of known MIME/MMail users Name: MPOWER Product: Platform: Contact: Author: HP Comments: [ Harald Alvestrand 22-Jan-1993 ] If anyone is interested, the new multimedia product from HP called MPOWER supports MIME format mail. You can drag and drop a picture onto the mail icon, and it will be sent as a MIME message. (Unfortunately, they forgot to quote the delimiter that had a dot in it, and PINE failed to parse that......well, it's a betatest.) Name: NetMail/3000 Product: SMTP/MIME compatible electronic mail system for HP3000s Platform: HP3000 MPE/V, HP3000 MPE/iX Contact: solcentr@netcom.com (Solution Centers International) Telephone: (US) 800 Net-Mail (UK)+44 (0480) 301364 (Other) +1 916 622-0630 Fax: (US) 916 622-0738 (UK) +44 (0480) 493109 (Other) +1 916 622-0738 Author: 3k Associates (support@3k.com) Comments: [ Chris Bartram 3-Jun-1994 ] NetMail/3000 is a full featured electronic mail system for HP3000 computer systems which was designed as an SMTP and MIME compatible network mail system. NetMail/3000 provides a user interface compatible with "dumb" terminals, but also has hooks to identify and utilize features of HP terminals and PC or Mac based HP terminal emulator packages. Users can send messages (8-bit character sets are supported) and attach any number of files (host or pc based) to their messages (PC/Mac based files are automatically retrieved and loaded), and all messages (and attachments) are exported in MIME format, though users can specify that files be encoded via 'uuencode' or 'binhex' if necessary to be readable by non-MIME compatible mail systems). NetMail/3000's user interface is also unique in that Windows-based terminal emulator users can allow NetMail/3000 to automatically extract and pass any message parts (not displayable in the terminal emulator) directly to their PC and have the appropriate application launched to view the file. (NetMail/3000 interrogates the PC on startup to determine the file types "associated" with applications.) NetMail/3000 also includes directory synchronization capability (compatible with Lotus' cc:Mail ADE format), a POP2 server, a quote-of-the-day and daytime server, and will soon be offering a HP3000-based gopher server. NetMail/3000 is priced independent of cpu size/speed/number of users, and includes network capability in the base product. 3k Associates is also an HP Channel Partner. Name: NetMail/3000 HPDesk FSC Gateway Product: SMTP/MIME compatible gateway for HPDesk users Platform: HP3000 MPE/V, HP3000 MPE/iX Contact: solcentr@netcom.com (Solution Centers International) Telephone: (US) 800 Net-Mail (UK)+44 (0480) 301364 (Other) +1 916 622-0630 Fax: (US) 916 622-0738 (UK) +44 (0480) 493109 (Other) +1 916 622-0738 Author: 3k Associates (support@3k.com) Comments: [ Chris Bartram 3-Jun-1994 ] The NetMail/3000 HPDesk FSC Gateway provides a bi-directional gateway between HPDesk mail users and the SMTP/MIME world. Any number of message attachments per message are supported; incoming messages are broken down into files on the HP3000 for HPDesk users and appear as normal message attachments, outgoing attachments are encoded as MIME-compatible message attachments (or optionally just as UUENCODED binary attachments for compatibility with non-MIME compatible mailers). The gateway operates in real-time, is a background process on the HP3000 (which is interrupt driven and uses minimal system resources), and requires no special hardware or additional software. The product is priced independent of platform size or type or number of users. Free 45 day demos are available. Name: PC-MM (PC Mail Manager) Product: MUA Platform: MS-Windows Contact: Lars_Hagberg@li.icl.se Author: ICL Comments: [ Tomas Kullman 30-Sep-1993 ] PC-MM from ICL is a Mail User Agent for Windows 3.1 implemented on Windows Socket API and TCP/IP. PC-MM is currently working on PC-NFS but is designed to be network software independent (i.e. will work on most TCP/IP softwares supporting WinSocket API). PC-MM is a MIME conformant internet mailer supporting SMTP and IMAP2 for sending and receiving. PC-MM requires a UNIX mail server (or similar supporting SMTP and IMAP2). PC-MM V1.0 supports a lot of nice features, such as: - user friendly interface - built-in and user-defined text editor - drag and drop between folders - local and server based folders - integrated address book - message sorting and tagging - "watch dog" for incoming messages PC Mail Manager is announced and volume shipping mid November 1993. For pricing and product packaging information please contact Lars Hagberg at ICL ProSystems AB; E-mail: Lars_Hagberg@li.icl.se or phone: + 46 (0)13 11 70 00. Name: PMDF Product: MTA Platform: VMS Contact: sales@innosoft.com service@innosoft.com Author: Innosoft International Comments: The VMSNET newsgroup 'vmsnet.mail.pmdf' is available for discussion. [ Ned Freed ] Send technical inquiries to service@innosoft.com. Product information, pricing, and literature can be obtained from sales@innosoft.com. The phone number is (909) 624-7907; FAX is (909) 621-5319. Street address is: Innosoft International, Inc. 250 W. First St., Suite 240 Claremont, CA 91711 Name: PP Product: MTA Platform: UNIX Contact: ic-info@isode.com (commercial version) [ "Harald T. Alvestrand" 22-Aug-1994 ] PP is an X.400 and SMTP mailer, and a gateway between these, so you can communicate with "both worlds". The latest and greatest version is the ISODE Consortium release, IC-R1, but this is no longer free. However, it is not expensive, either. The ISODE Consortium offers the source code to all Consortium members, and gives the right to sell products based on the code to commercial members. The PP included in Isode Consortium Release 1 (IC-R1) includes: - Conformance tested X.400/84, running over most stacks you care to name - X.400/88 - X.400 (84 and 88) to SMTP gateways (RFC 1327 compliant) - SMTP, DECNET and UUCP support - P3File (Retix-like) message submission and delivery - Routing using X.500 (experimental) - MIME gatewaying support (MIME-MHS/HARPOON compliant) - SNMP monitoring - X.500 and file based distribution lists - Fax gateway supporting Panasonic, Fujitsu and Class 2 fax modems Name: SecureMail Product: MUA Platform: AIX 3.2.5, SunOS 4.1, HP-UX 10.0, Open Desktop 3.0 Contact: info@sware.com Phone: (404) 315-6296, ext. 112 Where: http://www.secureware.com Pricing: $200 - $275 Author: SecureWare, Inc. Comments: [ Dottie Thornton 27-Jul-95 ] SecureMail is an e-mail package that includes Privacy Enhancement and Digital Signature capabilities. SecureMail supports MIME with a Motif graphical user interface and includes the following features: - Authentication, integrity, and encryption of messages - Graphical interface and on line help. - Spelling checker and word wrap. - Address book with groups and nicknames - Support for multi-media (MIME) attachments. SecureWare, Inc. 2957 Clairmont Road, Ste. 200 Atlanta, GA 30329 Name: SMTPLINK 2.1 Product: Platform: Contact: Author: Comments: [ 16-Dec-1992 ] Because this version (2.1) is a 2-3 QTR-93 release you should be talking to your sales rep about the tentative features of this product. They can be reached at 800-448-2500. Name: STI Document Browser Product: MS-Windows 3.1 (shipping), NeXTstep/X11/VMS (in the pipeline) Platform: Contact: info@sti.fi Author: Stream Technologies Inc Comments: [ Ed Anselmo 31-Dec-1992 ] Product name: STI Document Browser Platforms: How and where to get: Stream Technologies Inc. Valkjarventie 2 SF-02130 Espoo FINLAND Tel: +358 0 43577340 Fax: +358 0 43577348 E-Mail: info@sti.fi Name: Super-TCP Product: protocol stack + MUA Platform: MS-Windows Contact: TCP@FrontierTech.COM Author: Frontier Technologies Comments: [ Ray C Langford 28-Apr-1993 ] Frontier Technologies' Super-TCP for MS-Windows includes MIME support in their E-Mail mail system that is a part of the Super-TCP for Windows package. Super-TCP for Windows is a Windows Sockets compliant, 100% DLL implementation that can also operate in a TSR mode. Applications include: Network News Reader, Telnet, FTP Client/Server, NFS Client/Server, SMTP/POP2&3 MIME E-Mail, Telnet Redirector, Interactive Talk, and more. Options are also available for PPP, X.25, and OSI. With the MIME support in E-Mail, any type of binary file may be attached to your message, including Postscript files, spreadsheet files, database files, word processor files, graphic files, audio files, and digital video files. The packages in the Super-TCP product line that include the E-Mail (SMTP/POP2&3) with MIME support are: - Super-TCP for Windows Version 3.0 (Complete TCP/IP package) - Super-TCP/NFS for Windows Version 3.0 (Complete TCP/IP package with NFS client/server) - Super-TCP Applications for Windows Version 3.0 (Windows Sockets applications only) For further information, e-mail TCP@FrontierTech.COM or call +1 414 241-4555. [ "Carl S. Gutekunst" 31-Oct-1994 ] The current release of SuperTCP is 4.00R2. The stack no longer supports a TSR mode. Their MIME MUA is considerably improved in this release. Name: TCP/Connect II version 2.0 Product: MUA, news reader Platform: Macintosh Contact: sales@intercon.com Author: InterCon Systems Corporation Comments: [ Amanda Walker 6-Sep-1994 ] Full support for MIME in email, viewing support for MIME in news. Includes inline composition and display of the following MIME content types: text/plain image/gif video/quicktime text/richtext image/jpeg audio/basic text/enriched image/x-macpict application/applefile application/x-macbinhex40 multipart/mixed character sets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 Provides drag & drop support for file enclosures, automatic encoding and decoding of AppleSingle/AppleDouble ("MacMIME") body parts, as well as BinHex & uuencode for backward compatibility. Runs native on Power Macintosh computers. For more information please contact: InterCon Systems Corporation 950 Herndon Parkway Herndon, VA 22070 USA +1 703 709 5500 (voice) +1 703 709 5555 (fax) sales@intercon.com (Internet email) [ Dave Saunders 7-Mar-1995 ] To add to the list of contact information: http://www.intercon.com/ ftp://ftp.intercon.com/ Additionally, we have a Windows product which also is MIME aware. It does not have the nifty display features that the Mac product has though... Name: Z-Mail Product: MUA Platform: Unix Contact: info@z-code.com Author: Z-Code Software Corporation Comments: [ Carlyn M. Lowery 29-May-1993 ] Z-Mail, a Unix World Magazine "Product of the Year" winner for 1991, is a complete electronic mail system for workstations. Z-Mail provides Motif and Open Look graphical user interfaces, as well as two character modes. The software has been ported to nearly every system that runs Unix, and it works with all standard Unix mail transport agents including sendmail, binmail, smail, MMDF and X.400 gateways. Z-Mail can replace or coexist with standard mail user agents on the system, including BSD Mail, AT&T mailx, Sun Mail Tool, Elm, or Mush. Most anyone can use Z-Mail "off the shelf" and immediately benefit from its simple interface and advanced features. Z-Mail also includes Z-Script, a powerful scripting language that enables users to customize and extend Z-Mail's capabilities. Z-Mail's multi-media capabilities allow easy integration with best-of-class products including spreadsheets, desk-top publishing, graphics, fax, voice, and video. For example, when users receive a spreadsheet file, Z-Mail can be configured to automatically launch the associated application and load the the attachment automatically and transparently to the user. Z-Mail understands MIME-format documents and is also compatible with Sun's multimedia Mailtool. Mac, MS-DOS, and MS-Windows versions, as well as native MIME support, are planned for this summer. For more information on Z-Mail, contact: Z-Code Software Corp. 4340 Redwood Hwy., Suite B-50 San Rafael, CA 94903 tel: (415) 499-8649 fax: (415) 479-0448 e-mail: info@z-code.com Also, you can anonymous-ftp a demo copy of Z-Mail from ftp://ora.com/pub/z-code/zmail/2.1/ (The file you want is named zm.XXX.tar.Z, where XXX is your type of machine.) You'll need to call us after you do so we can send you an activation key. -- 9) MIME and USENET news ----------------------- 9.1) Introduction USENET articles are (by design) very similar to RFC 822 mail messages. It is therefore reasonable to expect MIME software to be adopted for use on USENET. A number of the mail user agents and tools discussed in section 7 also handle USENET news. -------------------------------- 9.2) News readers and transports with MIME support Name: GNUS Product: reader Platform: GNU Emacs Where: Author: Masanobu UMEDA Comments: [ Masanobu UMEDA 07-Aug-1993 ] GNUS is an NNTP-based newsreader for GNU Emacs. GNUS versions 3.14.4 and later directly support reading of articles written in MIME format. It only requires the metamail package. Compositions of articles written in MIME format requires "mime.el" that is a part of MIME tools for GNU Emacs (see section 7.2). Name: gnus-mime.el Product: reaJoe Ilacqua der Platform: GNU Emacs Where: ftp://world.std.com/dist/gnus-mime.el.shar (also in the contrib tree of metamail) Author: Joe Ilacqua Comments: [ Joe Ilacqua 24-Jun-1993 ] "gnus-mime.el" is an ELISP package that adds support for MIME to GNUS. This is the second release: I consider it very beta, and I'm sure there are bugs, but it does work. It provides support both to read and to post USENET articles in MIME format. It's scarcest feature is support for multi-part multi-media ".signatures". { Gnus-mime.el may be for GNUS prior to version 3.14.4. } Name: INN Product: transport Platform: Where: Author: Comments: [ Christopher Davis 03-Jun-1993 ] There is some minimal MIME support in the INN package. Since INN is a transport system, not a newsreader, the support is for transferring MIME messages, not reading them. [ Christophe Wolfhugel 23-Jul-1993 ] INN's MIME support is today divided in two parts: 1) the possibility to have nnrpd add default MIME headers to locally posted articles; 2) transfer-encoding changes on transport with "innxmit", i.e. recode 8bit to quoted-printable. Name: MH Product: reader Platform: Where: See section 7 for MH's FTP sites. Author: Comments: [ John Romine 30-Jul-1993 ] If you compile MH to use NNTP, it can read news with its "bbc" command; MH supports MIME. Name: mhunify (aka stacknews) Product: reader Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhunify.shar.gz Author: Jerry Sweet Comments: [ Jerry Sweet 11-Aug-1994 ] Mhunify is a set of perl scripts and templates that provides shell-level MH functionality with USENET news. Since MH supports MIME, MIME-format news articles just work. I've found that being able to handle news in the same way that I handle e-mail is very useful, although there are some tradeoffs: no kill files, no threads, at least for now. Mhunify also treats MH folders just like news groups. If you subscribe to several mailing lists, and your e-mail is automatically delivered to separate folders, say, via procmail or via MMDF's .maildelivery, the mhunify package lets you progress automatically through your folders just as you would news groups. Requirements: - csh or some shell with shell-level alias or procedure facilities; - perl 4.0 or later; - MH 6.8 or later; - direct file system access to the USENET news spool directory (typically /usr/spool/news - as a local or NFS mounted file system). Some of the goodies: stacknews - read USENET news using shell-level MH. ncomp, nrepl, nforw - compose, reply to, and forward to USENET news groups (these use nwhatnow). nwhatnow - post USENET articles & send e-mail from the same draft. consider - creates a folder, +consider by default, containing specified messages. bburst - bursts digests into a writeable folder, +consider by default. clearf - clears the MH folder stack. mhpped - utility composition template pre-processor. pscan - scan messages from point of previous scan. Plus man pages, templates, example configuration files, other utility programs, and a Makefile to install everything. Name: nn Product: reader Platform: Where: Author: Comments: [ Luc Rooijakkers 26-Jul-1993 ] The current beta release of nn tags newly posted articles as text/plain; charset=xxx with transfer encoding 8bit if the message contains any 8 bit characters. Reading support needs further work. Name: SNews Product: reader Platform: MS-DOS OS/2 Where: ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/~ftp/pub/msdos/uupc/snews191.zip MS-DOS binaries Where: ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/~ftp/pub/msdos/uupc/snws191o.zip OS/2 binaries Where: ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/~ftp/pub/msdos/uupc/snws191s.zip Source Author: Comments: [ Daniel Fandrich 27-Aug-1993 ] Revision 1.91 of the SNews newsreader for MS-DOS systems fixes several bugs in version 1.90 (alpha), as well as adding some much-needed features, including built-in support for ISO 8859/1/2/3/4/9 character sets (RFC 1521 and RFC 1522) and a single key interface to the metamail MIME decoder (or other user-specified program). An additional bonus is the availability of an OS/2 version. Name: strn Product: reader Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/readers/trn/strn/strn092.tar.gz Author: Clifford A Adams Comments: Strn has support for reading and creating MIME articles. Name: trn Product: reader Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/readers/trn/trn.tar.gz Author: Wayne Davison Comments: trn 3.0 has support for reading MIME articles with metamail, and creating them with mhn. -- End of Part 2 ************* -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,comp.answers,news.answers Path: news1.ucsd.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!munnari.OZ.AU!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!swing.iinet.net.au!news.uoregon.edu!news.kreonet.re.kr!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!usc!news.cerf.net!nntp2.cerf.net!shrike.irvine.com!jsweet From: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Subject: comp.mail.mime FAQ, part 2 of 3 (frequently asked questions list) Content-Type: message/partial; number=2; total=3; id="" References: Followup-To: comp.mail.mime Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Originator: jsweet@fester.irvine.com Sender: usenet@irvine.com (News Administration) Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: Irvine Compiler Corp., Irvine, California, USA Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 07:28:36 GMT Supersedes: Message-ID: Summary: This posting contains answers to some of the Frequently Asked Questions about MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Please read it before posting a question to comp.mail.mime. Expires: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 07:30:01 GMT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Lines: 2074 Xref: news1.ucsd.edu comp.mail.mime:6669 comp.answers:13046 news.answers:50816 Archive-Name: mail/mime-faq/part2 Version: $Id: mime2,v 3.14 1995/09/03 06:14:01 jsweet Rel $ Posting-Frequency: monthly -- ========================================================== comp.mail.mime frequently asked questions list (FAQ) (2/3) ========================================================== Part 2: MIME products ~~~~~~ -- Overview -------- This is part 2 of a Frequently Asked Questions document about MIME, the multipurpose and multi-media standard for Internet mail. Part 1 covers frequently asked questions. Part 2 is a listing of MIME products. Part 3 covers advanced topics. The usual disclaimers apply; you know what they are: no endorsements implied, no warranty, no safety, no nuthin'! :-) -- 7) Freely available MIME software packages ------------------------------------------ This section lists MIME-capable or MIME-enabling libraries, conversion tools, extension packages, mail user agents, and mail transport systems. Tools that are explicitly designed for handling MIME in USENET news are discussed in section 9, although many of the packages in this section also deal with USENET news. -------------------------------- 7.1) Libraries and Patches Name: c-client Product: MUA library code Platform: Unix, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Windows, TOPS-20, VAX/VMS Where: ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap.tar.Z Author: Mark Crispin Comments: [ comp.mail.misc FAQ ] Software writers only: c-client is a general library useful for creating MUA's. It provides a Application Program Interface for retrieving and manipulating mail messages. It supports the latest draft of MIME. It is driver based, and easily ported to new platforms and MTAs. The currently supported platforms include various versions of BSD and SysV Unix, MS-DOS, Macintosh and even TOPS-20(!). It supports mailboxes in various local file formats (e.g. Unix mbox, mail.txt, mh, mmdf), as well as remote mailbox access via the NNTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols. This is done transparently so the main program is normally not aware what kind of mailbox it is accessing. c-client does not contain any user interface. Rather, it contains everything else that goes into an MUA. c-client is called with such functions as mail_open(), mail_fetchheader(), mail_setflag(), etc. Just the thing if you want to write a new MUA. c-client is distributed as part of the University of Washington IMAP toolkit, and includes POP2, POP3, and IMAP2 (IMAP4 support is coming soon) client and server code. However, c-client does not require IMAP or POP, and can be built without these. Contact the author (Mark Crispin ) for technical questions. Name: FITS-v2 Product: xv patch Platform: Where: ftp://orangutan.cv.nrao.edu/pub/aips/xv/FITS-v2.tar.Z Author: [ Patrick P. Murphy 15-Nov-1994 ] This is a patch to xv that permits it to read and write FITS files. Granted it's probably not capable of digesting, say, a UV database from AIPS, but for most FITS images it seems to work reasonably well. I've used this to patch both xv versions 2 and 3 successfully. Were you to have this, it would then be possible to view the image by clicking on the URL/link, viewing it in xv, and then using xv's save function to save it to a local disk. I have not used this mode of operation extensively, and it's not at all clear how much of the header would be preserved beyond the bare essentials, but it's a start. If you just want "pretty pictures" it's definitely a good method. Another option would be to use the .mailcap to specify: image/fits; saoimage %s Sorry, I don't know how to make the system recognise a binary file, though I'm sure it's possible. Name: mimelite Product: library Platform: ANSI C Where: ftp://oslonett.no/Software/MsDos/Kommunikasjon/Offline/mimelt20.zip Where: ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/mail/mimelt20.zip Author: Gisle Hannemyr Comments: [ Gisle Hannemyr 20-May-1994 ] "mimelite" is a simple, lightweight library written in ANSI C that supports the parsing of MIME headers and encoding/decoding of body parts, suitable for inclusion in offline-readers. If you develop mail and newsreader software (user agents), you can link mimelite with your own program to make it support a significant subset of MIME (namely the Content-Transfer-Encodings 7BIT, 8BIT, BASE64 and QUOTED-PRINTABLE). mimelite also supports conversion between the ISO Latin 1 character set used for European character sets on USENET/Internet and PC-based character sets (e.g. Macintosh, IBM CP-437 and CP-850). The distribution archive also contains UNMIME, a standalone program to decode MIMEd messages encoded with BASE64 or QUOTED-PRINTABLE encoding. The mimelite library is general enough to work in a number of contexts, but it has been designed to work well on MS-DOS (where memory is a scarce resource). Its main application is intended to help extend MS-DOS-based "offline-readers" for RFC-822 and RFC-1036 conformant messages to also support RFC-1521 and RFC-1522. -------------------------------- 7.2) Conversion tools and extension packages Name: emil Product: tool Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/ Where: ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/unix/mail/emil/ Author: Martin Wendel Comments: [ Martin Wendel 8-Apr-1994 ] Emil is a tool for converting between message formats used by MIME, Eudora, SUN mailtool, PC and Mac based clients, etc. It is easily extensible. It can work either standalone, as an argument driven filter program, or, if linked with sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5 or sendmail-8.6.8, as a mail gateway convertering messages sent between various types of Internet mail clients. It will give a possibility to convert encoding formats of attachments and convert character sets of text. It can make a heterogenous mail environment, consisting of various types of mail clients, act as a homogenous environment; for instance sending only MIME based messages to the outside world. Name: encdec Product: tool Platform: ISO C Where: ftp://ftp.efd.lth.se/pub/mail/encdec.c-1.1.gz Author: Joergen Haegg Comments: encdec is a simple standalone encoder/decoder for base64 and quoted printable written in ISO C. Name: Enriched text valider Product: tool Platform: Unix (easily portable) Author: Daniel Glazman Contact: Daniel.Glazman@der.edf.fr Where: ftp://lara0.exp.edf.fr/pub/MIME/testEnriched.c [ Daniel Glazman 13-Oct-1994 ] This tool is a text/enriched valider useable in conjunction with the 'test' field of a mailcap file (for instance). Written in std C, its code has been made *very* simple and readable on purpose, even if it can be optimized. It detects unbalanced closing tags, illegal tags, tags longer than 60 chars and <<. Provided with the standard "as is" copyright notice. /*Enjoy !*/ Name: exmh Product: MUA Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/exmh/exmh-1.6.tar.Z Where: ftp://harbor.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/tcl/code/exmh-1.5.1.tar.gz Author: Contact: "Brent Welch" Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 13-Aug-1994 ] A Tk based UI to MH. Supports nested folders, MIME/metamail. [ Achim Bohnet 15-May-1995 ] Because exmh is always being updated, check for more recent versions in this location: ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/exmh/ Exmh supports these features: - PGP - xface - embedded URLs - glimpse full text search - extensive user configurability and extensibility The exmh home page may be found at this URL: http://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/exmh/html/index.html There are three exmh-related mailing lists: 1. For new exmh version announcements, write to: exmh-announce-request@parc.xerox.com Put this in the body: subscribe exmh-announce you@your.host 2. To join the exmh discussion list, write to: exmh-users-request@parc.xerox.com Put this in the body: subscribe exmh-users you@your.host 3. To join the exmh developers list, write to: exmh-workers-request@parc.xerox.com Put this in the body: subscribe exmh-workers you@your.host For mailing list archives, see ftp://parcftp.xerox.com:/pub/exmh/archive Files are in MH "packf" format, compressed. An html-ized archive of the exmh lists and related mailing lists (mh-users/workers, glimpse) is at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/~ach/exmh/archive/ The 3rd Edition of Jerry Peek's "MH & xmh" book from O'Reilly & Associates includes chapters about exmh. See also the USENET newsgroup "comp.mail.mh". Name: metamail Product: MUA and tools Platform: Unix Amiga MS-DOS Where: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/mm2.7.tar.Z The metamail distribution that Nathaniel Borenstein supports. Where: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/contrib2.7.tar.Z Contributed sources. Where: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/mm2.7.dos.zip MS-DOS binaries Author: Nathaniel Borenstein Comments: [ Paul Eggert ] Metamail is a software implementation of MIME, designed for easy integration with traditional mail-reading interfaces -- typically, users do not invoke metamail directly. Ideally, extending the local e-mail or news system to handle a new media format is a simple matter of adding a line to a mailcap file. Mailcap files are described in RFC 1343. [ Nathaniel Borenstein 9-Jan-1993 ] The metamail distribution includes a simple "mailserver" shell script that can be used to operate a MIME-conformant mail server mechanism, e.g. for making anon-ftp files available as MIME mail. ServiceMail is also now available under the "contrib" area of the metamail distribution. [ Jerry Sweet 10-Oct-1994 ] The "richtext" program in the metmail distribution has an undocumented command line option, "-e", which turns it into a viewer for text/enriched, the successor to text/richtext. Name: Mew (Message interface to Emacs Window) Product: MUA Platform: Emacs/Mule/XEmacs Where: ftp://ftp.csce.kyushu-u.ac.jp/pub/Misc/mew/mew-current.tar.gz Author: Kazuhiko YAMAMOTO Comments: [ Kazuhiko YAMAMOTO 14-Oct-1994 ] Mew (Message interface to Emacs Window) is a message interface to Emacs/Mule that integrates structured message such as MIME, PEM, and PGP. Mew is now based on MH but will support USENET news soon. Currently, following features are supported. * Selective MIME part viewer. * User friendly MIME composer that maps directory structure to multipart. * PEM auto decryption and functions for encrypting and signing. * PGP auto decryption and functions for encrypting and singing. * LRU message cache engine. * Only SPC key press interface. * Asynchronous inc and scan. * Dynamic window configuration. * Excellent refile folder guess algorithm. * Alias completion and expansion. * Easy pick and scan interface. * Mark based functions that treats multiple messages(e.g. unshar, uumerge). You should pronouns "Mew" as it is. Of course, it is meow of cat. P.S. You can find PEM/PGP/MIME integration information on 00faq in Mew's package. Name: MHonArc Product: HTML conversion tool Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/dtd2html/MHonArc1.0.0.tar.gz Author: Earl Hood [ Earl Hood 2-Oct-1994 ] MHonArc is a Perl program for converting e-mail messages as specified in RFC 822 and RFC 1521 (MIME) to HTML. MHonArc can perform the following tasks: * Convert mh(1) mail folders or mail(1) style mailboxes into an HTML mail archive. * Add new e-mail messages to an existing HTML mail archive generated by MHonArc. * Convert a single message to HTML. An index page is created when an archive is generated. MHonArc allows complete customization over the appearance of the index page including the ability to insert user defined HTML markup and content-type sensitive icons for the mail messages processed. For details refer to http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.doc.html The x-types handled by MHonArc are listed in section 3 of this FAQ. Name: MIME for VM/CMS Product: Platform: VM/CMS Where: gopher://ricevm1.rice.edu Author: Comments: [ Rick Troth 21-Jul-1993 ] This MIME decoder is available via Gopher from ricevm1.rice.edu under "Other freely distributable CMS software", which is under "CMS Gopher Software". It correctly reads: o text/plain, o text/richtext, and o image/gif. GIFs require the VMGIF package from Belgium. I need filters for PBM and PGM and then they'd work too. Sounds are not useful on the standard 3270 terminal (dumb terminals just don't play sounds). It splits out multipart/[anything] into separate files. CMS has a standard directory "browser" (FILELIST) that lets you view a bunch of related files and decide what, if anything, you want to do with them. Message/external-body doesn't work well, but probably will given more development time. I could use some samples to help with the debugging of that part. It does NOT do applications, except for the one, octet-stream. (which is treated as a kind-of "sendfile" utility) There *is* a PostScript interpreter for CMS, but it is reported to be a dog (we don't have it). But I do hope to put the extraction code in for these eventually. If a given content-type isn't understood, you just view the item as-is. For composition, there's no CHARSET= parameter on the Content-Type: text/plain line. It's EBCDIC until it gets into SMTP, then it's ASCII, then it might be anything, so I've left off the CHARSET= parameter. An "attach" command is added to RiceMAIL when you run this, which would then change the message from text/plain to multipart/mixed and append the attachment after a boundary. Attachments don't "close" properly; that is, the final boundary isn't correct, but is correctly processed by all of the MIME compliant readers I've checked. (there's some feature of RiceMAIL that causes this) This thing is based on CMS Pipelines, so adding features is easy since we now have the base for MIME processing. Name: MIME tools for GNU Emacs Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.kyutech.ac.jp/pub/MultiMedia/mime/emacs-mime-tools.shar Author: Masanobu UMEDA Comments: [ Masanobu UMEDA 07-Aug-1993 ] MIME tools that consist of "mime.el", "rmailmime.el" and "metamail.el" are tools for reading and composition of MIME messages for GNU Emacs and its variants. "mime.el" is a simple MIME message composer that works with mail mode, news mode, and mhe letter mode. Messages of plain and richtext text, audio, and image, and multipart messages of them can be composed by using "mime.el". "rmailmime.el" is for reading MIME messages within Rmail. "metamail.el" is an interface to metamail. The metamail package is required by these tools. Name: MIME tools for NeXT Product: editor Platform: NeXT Where: Author: Dave Lacey Comments: [ Dave Lacey ] I'd like to keep you apprised of some MIME work I'm doing. I'm interested in using MIME as a transport medium for multi-media gopher documents. My particular use is for Radiology info, but it would work for just about anything. I've got a NeXT Gopher client almost working and I also have a NeXT based MIME file editor that reads/creates MIME documents. Both work, but need a bit more extension. I will likely distribute the source to this, so the MIME reader (which is essentially an object) can be re-used in other apps. Name: mpack Product: MUA/utility Platform: Unix, MS-DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, Amiga, Archimedes Contact: mpack-bugs@andrew.cmu.edu Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-src.tar.Z Sources for all versions Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack15d.zip MS-DOS binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack15o.zip OS/2 binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-mac.hqx Macintosh binary Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-amiga.lha Amiga binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-arc.arc Archimedes binaries Where: ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack/mpack-1.5-linux.tar.gz Linux binaries Author: John Gardiner Myers, Chris Newman (Mac), Mike Meyer (Amiga), Peter Simons (Amiga), Jochen Friedrich (OS/2), Olly Betts (Archimedes) Comments: [ John Gardiner Myers 16-Feb-1995 ] Mpack is a minimal implementation of MIME, designed for encoding and decoding binary files in MIME messages. In short, it is the MIME equivalent of uuencode and uudecode. For backwards compatibility, it can also decode messages in split-uuencoded format. The Macintosh port can also handle AppleSingle, AppleDouble, and BinHex. Starting with version 1.5, all official mpack distributions are PGP signed by "John Gardiner Myers ". The PGP signatures are detached from the distributions themselves, in files with the ".asc" filename extension. [ Arjan van der Meer 30-Jan-1995 ] There is now a version of mpack/munpack for the Atari ST and compatibles. It is just a compiled version of the UNIX 1.2 version, but what I've tried worked okay. It is made by alex@hal.rhein-main.de. MPACK/MUNPACK Atari ST binary - ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/atari/misc/mpack_12.lzh Name: n2m Product: conversion tool Platform: NeXT Where: ftp://nexus.yorku.ca/pub/n2m.shar Author: Comments: [ Dave Collier-Brown 04-Jan-1993 ] Nn2m is a program that converts a file containing a NeXT-format multimedia message into a file containing a MIME-format multimedia message. It is usable on Berkeley-derived systems, or ones otherwise using /usr/lib/sendmail as a mail transfer agent. It is in use on SunOS 4.1.1 and Ultrix 4.2, tested briefly on Aix 3.2 and NeXT. Description: it is used with non-NeXT mail user agents to convert NeXT mail to MIME, which is intelligible to more than just the NeXT mail program. The resulting file will usually be more intelligible to non-multimedia mail user agents. The textual part of the mail is converted into text, as well as Microsoft RTF, and the attachments follow, as text/plain wherever possible, as base64 encoded binaries otherwise. This suffices for messages with ASCII files pasted into them. Caveat: This is a converter, not a translator: the conversion of sound and of the initial "index.rft" file is not correctness- preserving. Name: Safe-TCL (Enabled Mail) Product: extension package Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mrose/safe-tcl/safe-tcl.tar.Z Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mrose/safe-tcl/safe-tcl-contrib.tar.Z Author: Marshall T. Rose, Nathaniel Borenstein Contact: safe-tcl-request@uunet.uu.net Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 13-Aug-1994 ] Incoming email processing tool based on Tcl. Software also available which can build MIME messages and send them. Incoming email processing includes ability to execute encapsulated Tcl programs at delivery or upon viewing. [ Jerry Sweet 5-Sep-1994 ] Papers about Enabled Mail and Safe-TCL are available from these sources: ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/st/em-model.txt ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/st/safe-tcl.ps ftp://ftp.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/st/safe-tcl.txt Name: sd-launch Product: extension package Platform: Where: http://www.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/CCS/people/fenner/dist/sd-launch/ Where: ftp://ee.lbl.gov/conferencing/sd/ Where: ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/net-research/ Author: Contact: fenner@cmf.nrl.navy.mil (William C. Fenner) Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 27-Feb-1995 ] This is a MIME/WWW browser helper to launch MBONE sessions. Name: ServiceMail Product: toolset Platform: unknown Where: ftp://eitech.com Author: Enterprise Integration Technologies Corporation Contact: servicemail-help@eitech.com Comments: [ Jay C. Weber 13-Oct-1992 ] We (Enterprise Integration Technologies Corporation) have a MIME implementation, which we are distributing freely. Instead of a MIME MUA, it is a toolkit for building services that automatically process MIME messages. It is similar, in spirit, to the few other e-mail-scripting packages except: o it exploits several MIME features o it is intended to run standalone (as opposed to a back-end to a MUA) o it uses TCL (from Berkeley) as its scripting language and support for PEM is in the works. EIT is providing ServiceMail access to the ServiceMail toolkit. If you have the METAMAIL or some other MIME-compliant mail reader, just send the message To: services@eitech.com Subject: archive-request servicemail.tar.Z and read the response(s) using METAMAIL. Save the result in servicemail.tar.Z The package can also be retrieved by anonymous FTP from the site eitech.com. If you have any problems with acquisition, installation, or use, don't hesitate to send mail to "servicemail-help@eitech.com" and ask for help. IF YOU WANT FUTURE UPDATES ON TOOL KIT VERSIONS, BUGS, AND SERVICES, MAKE SURE YOU ARE ON THE PACT-KIT MAILING LIST. To get on it, send a message to "services@eitech.com" with subject "listserv subscribe pact-kit your-real-name". Name: sun-to-mime Product: conversion tool Platform: OpenWindows Where: ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.perl Where: ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.c Author: Keith Moore Comments: [ Keith Moore 27-Dec-1992 ] A perl script (and conversion to C of same) that converts OpenWindows mail to MIME. Body parts currently supported are: text, gif, Sun rasterfile (converted to image/gif), postscript, and audio. Other types default to application/octet-stream. It's easy to extend the set of types supported and to add conversions, if necessary. The script requires uuencode, uudecode, zcat (aka uncompress), and the "convert" program from ImageMagick. If you don't have ImageMagick you can probably substitute the pbm stuff with little fuss. Name: uu-to-mime Product: conversion tool Platform: perl Where: ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/uu-to-mime.perl Author: Keith Moore Comments: A perl script that translates an RFC 822 message containing a single uuencoded file to a MIME message containing a base64-encoded file. -------------------------------- 7.3) Mail user agents and transport systems Name: Andrew Product: Multimedia system Platform: Unix Where: Author: Comments: [ Susan Straub 11-Jan-1993 ] Andrew is a very large and ambitious software system developed at Carnegie Mellon University. It is installed at hundreds of sites throughout the world, and includes a multimedia document editor, help system, and various other utilities. In particular, it includes a feature-rich program, "messages", which can read and send mail and news articles in MIME format, including images, audio, richtext, and more. Andrew is available in binary release for several Unix system architectures, and also in source form. Be warned that the source distribution is itself about 50 megabytes, but you really are getting a LOT of stuff. For information on how to obtain a copy of Andrew, send mail to info-andrew-request@andrew.cmu.edu. Name: elm Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: Author: Comments: [ Syd Weinstein 21-Dec-1992 ] Elm support for MIME: 2.3 - uses metamail supplied patch from Nathaniel Borenstein. 2.4: reading: detects MIME headers and calls metamail automatically if the message cannot be displayed on the current screen using the native capabilities of the display (recognizes some char sets as native) sending: detects [include ] markers and makes them MIME attachments. Still very 'crude', but its all we had time for, as to the release deadline of 'Elm' and MIME. 3.x: reading: probably no change from 2.x, but will understand some 'file storage' types and allow for splitting off attachments on their own. sending: will allow defining attachments to be added and auto build the MIME stuff, in addition to the [include ] syntax. release status: 2.3: obsolete 2.4: Current PL is 23. 3.x: not planned until some time in 1994. [ Sven Guckes 18-Apr-1995 ] > 2.4: Current PL is 23. Make that "PL24". > 3.x: not planned until some time in 1994. Make that "1995". Or even "1996". Name: Eudora 1.4.4 Product: MUA Platform: Macintosh MS-Windows Where: ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/windows/1.4/eudor144.exe Where: ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/mac/1.4/eudora144.hqx Where: ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/systems/ibmpc/windows3/winsock/eudora14.exe Author: Steve Dorner Author: Jeff Beckley (Windows Version) Comments: Eudora 1.4 is a MUA for Macs and PCs that uses POP3 and SMTP and supports MIME. A commercial version is also available: see the next section. [ "Where" info from Lourdes Yero 15-May-1995 ] Name: HUyMail Product: MTA/MUA Platform: VMS Where: ftp://ftp.technion.ac.il/pub/unsupported/vms/local/local/huymail*.bck Author: Yehavi Bourvine Comments: [ Yehavi Bourvine 22-Jul-1993 ] HUyMailer is a store and forward mailer for VAX/VMS and AXP/VMS systems which supports as transports: DECnet, Multinet/TcpIp, HUJI-NJE and PMDF. The software is available freely for non-commercial use as a C source code. The mailer supports two users' interfaces: VMS/MAIL (to which the connection is done via MAIL11 DECnet connection) or a locally written interface called BMAIL. BMAIL is a menu oriented interface which supports MIME and Hebrew. Name: Iride Product: MUA Platform: Macintosh Where: ftp://gnbts.univ.trieste.it/mime/Iride.sea.hqx Author: GNBTS Comments: [ From the README ] Iride is (or will be -- it's currently in beta test) an implementation of a MIME user agent on the Apple Macintosh computer. It was developed as part of a project of the GNBTS - Gruppo Nazionale Bioingegneria sezione di Trieste, for the integration of multimedia mail with hospital data storing facilities, in particular for the transfer of bioimages. This is a far from a complete MIME implementation, but I think it is quite usable. To use it you need: o Macintosh with MacTCP 1.1 or better installed o 32 bit ColorQuickDraw if you want to use images o audio input device if you want to create audio messages o connection to a SMTP mail relay o connection to a POP3 server MIME types supported: text/plain charset=US-ASCII only text/richtext (no tool for composing richtext yet) audio/basic audio/X-macaudio generated when a NOT sampled audio pasted in image/GIF image/X-macPICT generated when color QuickDraw is missing only multipart/mixed each part is shown in a different window MUST change this multipart/parallel multipart/alternative handled as multipart/mixed MUST change this Name: mercurius Product: MUA Platform: Where: ftp://ftp.lii.unitn.it/pub/mercurius/mercurius.tar.Z Author: Contact: mercurius-bugs@lii.unitn.it Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" 13-Aug-1994 ] Mercurius facilitates composing and reading multimedia electronic messages compliant with the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Name: MEUF [Mail Extended Using Faces] Product: MUA Platform: Unix/X Where: ftp://ftp.inria.fr Where: ftp://ftp.enst.fr Contact: Daniel.Glazman@der.edf.fr Author: Daniel Glazman Comments: [ Daniel Glazman 23-Sep-1994 ] Meuf is a student project I developed at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications de Paris with the System staff. It has grown A LOT to become a MIME-native MUA running under Xt/Xaw. Earlier non-MIME versions (1.3 and 1.4) are available by anonymous ftp from ftp.inria.fr and ftp.enst.fr. Currently developed version 3.0 will be released as a freely available product as soon as I'll get the authorization. Code has features: Pure MUA features: * Faces (48x48 XBM bitmaps) display using the X-Faces header field and included logos distribution * does not rely on "faces" package * folders (also with Faces display) * waste basket * messages sort by date, subject, length, ... * unlimited aliases * .face, .signature, .prologue, /usr/games/fortune handling * automagically deleted messages * References, Priority, Bcc, Return-Receipt-To handling * "Trusted Users" features * ignored header fields * online help * drag and drop for messages/folders management * interactive Face design * "Properties" windows MIME features: * does not rely on "metamail" package * full MIME composition and restitution for non-textual parts and text/plain * multiparts composition and restitution * basic text/richtext and text/enriched restitution * mailcap mechanism * Sun-Attachments parsing * MIME incorporation * MIME-clipboard (copy/paste of MIME parts between messages) * extraction of forwarded MIME-messages for MIME restitution * User's Guide (PS), Admin. Guide (PS) Successfully compiled and used with: Sun SunOs 4.1.x and Solaris 2.x HP 9000/7xx HP-UX > 9.01 DECstation Ultrix IBM RS6000 AIX > 3.2.4 Convex More information at http://lara0.exp.edf.fr/glazman/meuf.html Availability will be announced in comp.mail.mime newsgroup. Name: MH 6.8 Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/mh/mh-6.8.tar.Z Where: ftp://louie.udel.edu/portal/mh-6.8.tar.Z Author: Comments: MIME support is available for the MH message handling system; the primary reader and generator is the program mhn(1) although other MH programs are also changed. The current release of MH is 6.8.3. Mhn does not use the mailcap mechanism described in RFC 1343. Instead, it has its own flexible extension mechanism, called a profile. A tutorial for mhn is available: Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.tex.Z ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.sty.Z ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.ps.Z See the newsgroup comp.mail.mh for further information. Name: MIXMH Product: MUA Platform: Unix with X Where: ftp://aun.uninett.no/pub/mail/mixmh/mixmh-0.3.tar.Z Author: Comments: [ Harald Tveit Alvestrand 10-Dec-1992 ] This version is based on XMH version 1.6 from SEI, Carnegie Mellon. It supports sending MIME with extended character sets in the headers (per RFC 1342) and the body (per RFC 1341 text/plain). It has limited support for multipart messages. The source is freely redistributable and modifiable. As you can see from the version number, it is still not considered fully stable. Bugs may be reported to mixmh-bugs@uninett.no Information and discussion will take place on mixmh-info@uninett.no; mail to mixmh-info-request@uninett.no to join. Name: Pegasus mail Product: MUA Platform: MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Macintosh Where: ftp://risc.ua.edu/pub/network/pegasus/* Author: David Harris Comments: [ James Ford 2-Nov-1993 ] Pegasus Mail is an E-Mail package for Novell network v2.15 and higher that supports MHS (natively) and SMTP. The MS-DOS version (v3.01a) is MIME compliant; the MS-Windows version should be by mid-November. I do not know the timetable for the Mac version. You can either get a PC-based SMTP gateway for it (Charon, by Brad Clements) or a (Netware v3.11) NLM-based version (Mercury, by David Harris) from risc.ua.edu. I believe that the SMTP gateway Mercury supports 8-bit MIME encoding. [ Henning Stams 21-Nov-1994 ] MS-DOS-Version currently is 3.22. It's internationalized (German, Czech, Dutch and many more). Windows-Version is currently 1.22; v2.0 soon to come. Also Mime-compliant MERCURY runs on NW 3.11, 3.12, 4.x (Currently Bindery Emul. Mode; soon in NDS-Mode). Current Version: 1.13 Name: Pine Product: MUA Platform: Unix Where: ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine.tar.Z Author: Laurence Lundblade, Michael Seibel, Mark Crispin Comments: [ From the release notes 21-Sep-1993 ] Pine(tm) --a Program for Internet News & E-Mail-- is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. It was designed specifically with novice computer users in mind, but can be tailored to accommodate the needs of "power users" as well. Pine uses Internet message protocols (e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, NNTP) and runs on Unix and MS-DOS. The guiding principles for Pine's user-interface were: careful limitation of features, one-character mnemonic commands, always-present command menus, immediate user feedback, and high tolerance for user mistakes. It is intended that Pine can be learned by exploration rather than reading manuals. Feedback from the University of Washington community and a growing number of Internet sites has been encouraging. Pine's message composition editor, Pico, is also available as a separate stand-alone program. Pico is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker. [ David L Miller 31-Aug-1994 ] For more information, see http://www.cac.washington.edu/pine/ Name: Tkmailto Product: MUA Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://harbor.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/tcl/code/tkmailto-1.0.tar.gz Author: Contact: "Johan Lindbladh" Comments: [ "Larry W. Virden" , 13-Aug-1994 ] Alpha version Tk-based mail composer which supports MIME. Requires Safe-Tcl 1.1. -- 8) Commercial MIME software packages ------------------------------------ Name: Echelon Product: MUA Platform: NEXTSTEP Contact: ak272@freenet.acsu.buffalo.edu Author: Doug Boyce Comments: Echelon is a MUA for NEXTSTEP that can decode, display, and compose both NeXTmail and MIME. Most MIME types are supported. A demo version is available from Where: ftp://nova.cc.purdue.edu/pub/next/submissions/Echelon_1.12.tar.gz Name: ECSMail Product: MUA/MTA Platform: Unix, NT, OS/2, OpenVMS, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Mac System 7 Contact: ECS Sales Phone: +1 403 420 8081 Author: Comments: [ Steve Hole 24-Aug-1993 ] ECSMail is an electronic mail product for building enterprise mail systems. It is designed from start to finish as a system for establishing mail services throughout an organization, with external organizations and the world information system in general. It does this by using a completely standards based architecture. ECSMail is comprised of the following system components: ECSMail MUA Set - a set of Mail User Agents (MUA) ECSMail MTA Set - a set of Message Transport Agents (MTA) ECSMail MS Set - a set of Message Services (MS) All components support both MIME/822 and X.400, and run under Unix, Microsoft NT, OS/2, OpenVMS. Additionally, the MUA Set runs under MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac System 7. Pricing for the ECS products and ISA business information can be obtained by contacting: ECS Sales 835 10040 - 104 Street Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 0Z2 Phone: 403-420-8081 Fax: 403-420-8037 or by sending a request through electronic mail to the address: ECS Sales Name: E-Mail Connection 2.5.03 Product: MUA Platform: Microsoft Windows Where: http://www.connectsoft.com/products/free_emc25.shtml Contact: ConnectSoft Comments: [ "Daniel J. Trentman" 16-Jul-1995 ] The following introduced it to me: ------- From yxiao@econ.lsa.umich.edu (Yuan Xiao) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: a very very good e-mail program Date: 13 Jul 1995 22:03:44 GMT I'm wondering why nobody has mentioned E-Mail Connection 2.5.03 from ConnectSoft. The commercial version is an award-winning all-purposed e-mail program that can send e-mail to internet, AOL, CompuServe, etc. Now they are giving away a version of this program for free! It has all features of the commercial version but can only send internet e-mail (but I think many people only need to send internet e-mail). It has MIME, automatically records sender's address in your address book, has a spell checker, rules to sort incoming mail, folders, drag and drop, two modes of operation (one for novices with help and one for experts), automatic checking incoming mail on server at scheduled time interval, etc. Above all, it has the most beautiful interface I've ever seen in an e-mail program (except for that e-mail program in the movie "Disclosure". I'm wondering does such a thing exist or is anybody going to write one?). You can even set a wallpaper in the program window. It certainly beats Eudora (the freeware version. Of course, it beats any commercial program by price) in terms of features and interface. It's as easy to use. It's superior to Pegasus in terms of interface and ease of use. I don't know how it compares to Pegasus in terms of feature but it does include all the features an average user will ever need. It's such a pleasure to use this program that I find I'm sending much more e-mails after I acquired this program! - -Aaron ------- Name: Eudora 2.0.2 Product: MUA Platform: Macintosh Contact: eudora-sales@qualcomm.com Author: Steve Dorner Author: Jeff Beckley (Windows Version) Comments: Commercial versions of Eudora with more features than the freely available ones. Information about the commercial versions of Eudora can be found at: ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/windows/Eudor2Info-*.exe ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/eudora/mac/Eudora2Info-*.sea.hqx Name: IBM multimedia mail Product: Platform: OS/2 Contact: Jerry Cuomo Author: IBM Comments: [ Larry Salomon Jr 10-Dec-1992 ] I'm not going to follow this group, but I wanted to state that IBM - at the T.J. Watson Research Center - is developing a multimedia mail application for OS/2 which is based on the Mime spec. They demoed it at Interop. For more information, including (probably) how to become a test site (I haven't confirmed whether they're actually going to do this, but they've done it before), contact the department manager, Jerry Cuomo, at gcuomo@watson.ibm.com. Name: iGate Product: WordPerfect Office gateway Platform: Contact: smart@actrix.gen.nz Author: Smart Systems Comments: [ Quentin Smart 25-Sep-1993 ] iGate provides seamless connectivity to SMTP mail from WordPerfect office. Running as a native gateway under the Office Connection server and incorporting a TCP/IP stack iGate is a complete solution with no extras like MHS or TCP/IP stacks required. Further information from: Smart Systems PO Box 5017 Wellington, New Zealand +64 6 3561484 smart@actrix.gen.nz Name: Internet Exchange for cc:Mail Product: cc:Mail to SMTP/MIME Internet Mail Gateway Platform: MS-Windows Contact: sales@ima.com Phone: +1 415 871 4045 Author: International Messaging Associates Comments: [ Tim Kehres 08-Dec-1993 ] For cc:Mail users, Internet Exchange is the gateway of choice to provide standardized full multimedia connectivity between cc:Mail users and their Internet partners. Internet Exchange for cc:Mail can be used to interconnect cc:Mail networks with external users on the Internet as well as connecting your own internal network to your cc:Mail community. Internet Exchange for cc:Mail is the first SMTP to cc:Mail gateway that suports the full MIME Internet standard for exchanging rich media multipart messages. This means that your cc:Mail users can now exchange any attachment types with Internet based mail systems. By using the MIME standard, Internet Exchange for cc:Mail users will be assured future compatibility with other MIME compliant mail gateways. To simplify administration and management, the Internet Exchange System Manager runs under Windows 3.1. On screen buttons provide administration access into the gateway operations. Managers can easily view and modify all gateway activity. Message routing is accomplished using any combination of host tables,Domain Name System (DNS) lookup, and default mail host routing. Name: InterOFFICE Product: Multiplatform MTA and gateway for most email systems Platform: UNIX, OS/2, VAX/VMS, Tandem NonStop, NeXTSTEP, HP 3000, AS/400, VM/370, Wang VS Contact: info@bsw.com Phone: +1 617 482 9898 Author: The Boston Software Works, Inc. Comments: [ Larry Campbell 28-Jan-1995 ] InterOFFICE is a portable and modular family of gateway modules (access units, we call 'em) that interconnect a wide variety of email systems, including: ALL-IN-1, cc:Mail, HP Desk, HP OpenMail, IBM OfficeVision/400, IBM OfficeVision/VM (formerly known as PROFS), Microsoft Mail, NeXTMAIL, Novell MHS, QuickMail, Tandem TRANSFER, Wang OFFICE, X.400, and of course, Internet mail. The Internet access unit fully supports MIME, enabling users of proprietary email systems to exchange multipart messages containing text, images, audio, and binary files with Internet users. Name: Ishmail Product: MUA Platform: SunOS, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and UnixWare Contact: info@hal.com Phone: +1 800 762 0253 or +1 512 834 9962 Where: ftp://ftp.halsoft.com Pricing: $99 U.S. for single user. Multi-user/site license discounts. Author: HaL Software Systems Comments: [ Frank Bieser 21-Jun-1994 ] Ishmail is a MIME-capable e-mail tool with a Motif graphical user interface. Ishmail includes the following features: - Full support of MIME data types: plain text, rich text, GIF, JPEG, U-LAW audio, MPEG, binary, PostScript, ODA, RFC822 mail message, plus user-defined extensions. - Message attachments supported via: local file, AFS, mail server, regular FTP, anonymous FTP, and TFTP. - Support for composing, viewing, and printing rich text messages. - Easily customized through GUI dialogs for fonts, definition and placement of custom buttons, message list sorting and format, etc. - Variety of user interaction methods, ranging from "drag and drop" and custom buttons to keyboard shortcuts. - Support for use of, modification, and addition of sendmail-style mail aliases. - User defined alert commands and icons, triggered by matching patterns in incoming mail headers. - On-line help cards, including context sensitive help. - Full end-user manual provided in PostScript format. - Complete hypertext version of end-user manual available via World Wide Web at http://www.hal.com/products/sw/ishmail/user-guide.html HaL Software Systems 3006 Longhorn Blvd #A-113 Austin, TX 78758-7631 Name: Mail 3.3 Product: MUA Platform: NEXTSTEP Contact: Lennart Lovstrand Author: NeXT Computer, Inc. Phone: +1 800-TRY-NeXT, +1 415-366-0900 Comments: [ Lennart Lovstrand 28-Feb-1995 ] Mail 3.3 is an easy-to-use multimedia graphical mail user interface that can send and receive messages in both NeXTmail or MIME format. It has support for hierarchical mailboxes, address books, "Lip Service" voice mail and a bunch of other stuff. Mail 3.3 comes as part of the NEXTSTEP 3.3 User System available for NeXT Computers, 486-based PCs, HP, and SPARC based workstations. Name: Mail*Hub Product: Platform: Control Data 4000 Series Mips-based Unix systems Contact: rrr@svl.cdc.com Author: Control Data Systems Comments: [ 23-Dec-1992 ] Mail*Hub includes support for X.400, X.500, SMTP, and creating, viewing, and sending MIME enclosures in mail. In addition, the Fax Gateway portion of Mail*Hub supports sending mail with MIME enclosures to a Fax machine. Graphical MIME components (Postscript, GIF, TIFF,...) are automatically recognized and imaged at the receiving Fax machine. Name: MAIL-IT Product: MUA Platform: MS Windows 3.x Contact: mail-it@unipalm.co.uk Phone: 1-800-368-0312 (+44) 223 250 100 Author: Unipalm Ltd. Comments: [ Maria Porto , 7-Jul-1994 ] MAIL-IT is a Winsock-compatible SMTP/POP mail client with MIME functionality. By implementing Microsoft's Extended MAPI architecture, MAIL-IT allows mail to be sent from directly within MAPI-enabled applications such as Word for Windows, Excel, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and Ami Pro, thus Internet-enabling the user's desktop. MAIL-IT benefits include: - support for MIME - implementation of Microsoft's MAPI architecture - full drag and drop - hierarchical foldering - uses SMTP for sending, and POP2 or POP3 for receiving mail - local address book There is a 30-day demo copy available for anonymous ftp: ftp://pipe.pipex.net/xtech/mail-it/mie202.zip Please contact us for the decrypting password. Name: Mail*Link SMTP for QuickMail, Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk, and PowerShare Product: Macintosh Mail systems to SMTP/MIME gateways Platform: Macintosh Contact: info@starnine.com Phone: 510-649-4949 Author: StarNine Technologies, Inc. Comments: [David Thompson 19-Sept-1994 ] Mail*Link SMTP 3.0 is the industry-standard for connecting Macintosh mail systems to each other, as well as PC, UNIX and host-based mail systems on corporate LANs and the Internet. The Mail*Link family of gateways now provides MIME support for all major Macintosh LAN messaging systems including QuickMail, Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk and PowerShare Collaboration servers. Per-destination processing of messages in version 3.0 allows gateway administrators to configure translation and enclosure handling methods for outgoing messages addressed to a specific SMTP address, domain, or host. The gateway ships with three preprogrammed translation methods for sending messages to users on PCs, UNIX, and MIME-capable systems. Mail*Link SMTP uses the proposed MacMIME standard to allow more flexibility when receiving messages with MIME-encoded Macintosh files. An option to encode an attachment's datafork only with MIME greatly increases compatibility with non-Macintosh MIME systems. Other enclosure handling options include MacBinary-UUENCODE, AppleSingle-UUENCODE, BinHex 4.0, and Datafork-only-UUENCODE, and StuffIt compression. Name: Mail*Link Internet for PowerTalk Product: PowerTalk to SMTP/MIME Internet Mail Gateway Platform: Macintosh System 7.5 Contact: info@starnine.com Phone: 510-649-4949 Author: StarNine Technologies, Inc. Comments: [David Thompson 19-Sept-1994 ] Mail*Link Internet for PowerTalk is a personal gateway that allows System 7.5 users in SMTP/POP3 environments to exchange messages with Internet mail users. Version 1.0 supports System 7.5 and System 7 Pro Macintoshes with MacTCP (included) on a local area network. It uses the standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol (POP3) for sending and reading mail within the LAN. If the LAN is connected to the Internet, PowerTalk users can also exchange messages with external Internet users. Version 1.5, due out in September, 1994 will support SLIP or PPP connections. Incoming Internet messages are placed in the PowerTalk universal mailbox on the desktop. Users can send Internet messages from within their preferred PowerTalk-savvy application such as WordPerfect, ClarisWorks, or the Finder. The gateway supports standard Macintosh file enclosure handling methods including AppleSingle-UUEncode, Datafork only-UUENCODE, MacBinary, and BinHex, as well as MIME. A 60-day trial version of the gateway is available on StarNine's anonymous FTP server (ftp://ftp.starnine.com/pub/evals/pt-inet) as well as on the CD-ROM version of Apple's System 7.5 product (look in the CD Extras folder). Name: Mi'Mail Product: MUA Platform: MS Windows 3.x Contact: info@irisoft.be Phone: +32 16 23 23 01 Author: IRISoft Research Comments: [ Jean-Louis Herman 12-Apr-1995 ] Mi'Mail is a electronic mail product with: - Full MIME support (Nested multiparts, Message/Partial,...). - Distributed address books. - Connection with X500 for getting electronic addresses. - Distributed, hierarchical and open folder system (folders contain messages but also any kind of document, any application can get the information stored in the folders). - User friendly interface (drag and drop, context sensitive help, powerful editor). - Uses SMTP and POP3 over TCP or over serial lines with modems. - Automatic solution for managing the compatibility between MIME and non MIME users. - DDE server (with the same interface as cc:mail). - Transparent support of ISO 8859 character sets. - Easy management of the attachments (use of the Windows registration database, drag and drop,..) - Automatic mail checking, sendmail acknowledgment support, Multi-user application. An evaluation version is available at the following site: ftp://ftp.eunet.be/pub/EUnet/dos Name: MMail Product: MUA Platform: SunOS, Solaris Contact: mmail@atelier.demon.co.uk Author: Atelier de Software Ltd. Comments: [ "Dr. Martin R. Raskovsky" 18-Jul-1995 ] MMail: a WYSIWYG text composition, visualization and MIME mailer. - Text organized in different fonts. - Inline images (images mixed with text) Works on Sun/SPARC with: Operating System: SunOS 4.1.2 or greater, Solaris 2.1 or greater Window Manager: X11, OpenLook, Motif Free full functionality evaluation available via FTP. MMail - Features: WYSIWYG full text composition and visualization. (MIME/text/enriched or MIME/application/MMail) Text Organization: Adjust to margins Line attributes (Left, Center, Right, Spread, Fixed) Images mixed within text delivered as multipart/mixed IMAP2 interface (and IMAP4 when it becomes available) Hyphenation (in 17 different languages) Spell (via Unix spell) Multiple fonts (ISO-8859-1) MIME/attachments via mailcap to viewer Alias and Group Mail Box Filing/Editing Ignored unwanted headers Automatic File Carbon Copy File Include (signature, template, image) Message Find/Sort/Move/Delete/Undelete/History Data Base of known MIME/MMail users Name: MPOWER Product: Platform: Contact: Author: HP Comments: [ Harald Alvestrand 22-Jan-1993 ] If anyone is interested, the new multimedia product from HP called MPOWER supports MIME format mail. You can drag and drop a picture onto the mail icon, and it will be sent as a MIME message. (Unfortunately, they forgot to quote the delimiter that had a dot in it, and PINE failed to parse that......well, it's a betatest.) Name: NetMail/3000 Product: SMTP/MIME compatible electronic mail system for HP3000s Platform: HP3000 MPE/V, HP3000 MPE/iX Contact: solcentr@netcom.com (Solution Centers International) Telephone: (US) 800 Net-Mail (UK)+44 (0480) 301364 (Other) +1 916 622-0630 Fax: (US) 916 622-0738 (UK) +44 (0480) 493109 (Other) +1 916 622-0738 Author: 3k Associates (support@3k.com) Comments: [ Chris Bartram 3-Jun-1994 ] NetMail/3000 is a full featured electronic mail system for HP3000 computer systems which was designed as an SMTP and MIME compatible network mail system. NetMail/3000 provides a user interface compatible with "dumb" terminals, but also has hooks to identify and utilize features of HP terminals and PC or Mac based HP terminal emulator packages. Users can send messages (8-bit character sets are supported) and attach any number of files (host or pc based) to their messages (PC/Mac based files are automatically retrieved and loaded), and all messages (and attachments) are exported in MIME format, though users can specify that files be encoded via 'uuencode' or 'binhex' if necessary to be readable by non-MIME compatible mail systems). NetMail/3000's user interface is also unique in that Windows-based terminal emulator users can allow NetMail/3000 to automatically extract and pass any message parts (not displayable in the terminal emulator) directly to their PC and have the appropriate application launched to view the file. (NetMail/3000 interrogates the PC on startup to determine the file types "associated" with applications.) NetMail/3000 also includes directory synchronization capability (compatible with Lotus' cc:Mail ADE format), a POP2 server, a quote-of-the-day and daytime server, and will soon be offering a HP3000-based gopher server. NetMail/3000 is priced independent of cpu size/speed/number of users, and includes network capability in the base product. 3k Associates is also an HP Channel Partner. Name: NetMail/3000 HPDesk FSC Gateway Product: SMTP/MIME compatible gateway for HPDesk users Platform: HP3000 MPE/V, HP3000 MPE/iX Contact: solcentr@netcom.com (Solution Centers International) Telephone: (US) 800 Net-Mail (UK)+44 (0480) 301364 (Other) +1 916 622-0630 Fax: (US) 916 622-0738 (UK) +44 (0480) 493109 (Other) +1 916 622-0738 Author: 3k Associates (support@3k.com) Comments: [ Chris Bartram 3-Jun-1994 ] The NetMail/3000 HPDesk FSC Gateway provides a bi-directional gateway between HPDesk mail users and the SMTP/MIME world. Any number of message attachments per message are supported; incoming messages are broken down into files on the HP3000 for HPDesk users and appear as normal message attachments, outgoing attachments are encoded as MIME-compatible message attachments (or optionally just as UUENCODED binary attachments for compatibility with non-MIME compatible mailers). The gateway operates in real-time, is a background process on the HP3000 (which is interrupt driven and uses minimal system resources), and requires no special hardware or additional software. The product is priced independent of platform size or type or number of users. Free 45 day demos are available. Name: PC-MM (PC Mail Manager) Product: MUA Platform: MS-Windows Contact: Lars_Hagberg@li.icl.se Author: ICL Comments: [ Tomas Kullman 30-Sep-1993 ] PC-MM from ICL is a Mail User Agent for Windows 3.1 implemented on Windows Socket API and TCP/IP. PC-MM is currently working on PC-NFS but is designed to be network software independent (i.e. will work on most TCP/IP softwares supporting WinSocket API). PC-MM is a MIME conformant internet mailer supporting SMTP and IMAP2 for sending and receiving. PC-MM requires a UNIX mail server (or similar supporting SMTP and IMAP2). PC-MM V1.0 supports a lot of nice features, such as: - user friendly interface - built-in and user-defined text editor - drag and drop between folders - local and server based folders - integrated address book - message sorting and tagging - "watch dog" for incoming messages PC Mail Manager is announced and volume shipping mid November 1993. For pricing and product packaging information please contact Lars Hagberg at ICL ProSystems AB; E-mail: Lars_Hagberg@li.icl.se or phone: + 46 (0)13 11 70 00. Name: PMDF Product: MTA Platform: VMS Contact: sales@innosoft.com service@innosoft.com Author: Innosoft International Comments: The VMSNET newsgroup 'vmsnet.mail.pmdf' is available for discussion. [ Ned Freed ] Send technical inquiries to service@innosoft.com. Product information, pricing, and literature can be obtained from sales@innosoft.com. The phone number is (909) 624-7907; FAX is (909) 621-5319. Street address is: Innosoft International, Inc. 250 W. First St., Suite 240 Claremont, CA 91711 Name: PP Product: MTA Platform: UNIX Contact: ic-info@isode.com (commercial version) [ "Harald T. Alvestrand" 22-Aug-1994 ] PP is an X.400 and SMTP mailer, and a gateway between these, so you can communicate with "both worlds". The latest and greatest version is the ISODE Consortium release, IC-R1, but this is no longer free. However, it is not expensive, either. The ISODE Consortium offers the source code to all Consortium members, and gives the right to sell products based on the code to commercial members. The PP included in Isode Consortium Release 1 (IC-R1) includes: - Conformance tested X.400/84, running over most stacks you care to name - X.400/88 - X.400 (84 and 88) to SMTP gateways (RFC 1327 compliant) - SMTP, DECNET and UUCP support - P3File (Retix-like) message submission and delivery - Routing using X.500 (experimental) - MIME gatewaying support (MIME-MHS/HARPOON compliant) - SNMP monitoring - X.500 and file based distribution lists - Fax gateway supporting Panasonic, Fujitsu and Class 2 fax modems Name: SecureMail Product: MUA Platform: AIX 3.2.5, SunOS 4.1, HP-UX 10.0, Open Desktop 3.0 Contact: info@sware.com Phone: (404) 315-6296, ext. 112 Where: http://www.secureware.com Pricing: $200 - $275 Author: SecureWare, Inc. Comments: [ Dottie Thornton 27-Jul-95 ] SecureMail is an e-mail package that includes Privacy Enhancement and Digital Signature capabilities. SecureMail supports MIME with a Motif graphical user interface and includes the following features: - Authentication, integrity, and encryption of messages - Graphical interface and on line help. - Spelling checker and word wrap. - Address book with groups and nicknames - Support for multi-media (MIME) attachments. SecureWare, Inc. 2957 Clairmont Road, Ste. 200 Atlanta, GA 30329 Name: SMTPLINK 2.1 Product: Platform: Contact: Author: Comments: [ 16-Dec-1992 ] Because this version (2.1) is a 2-3 QTR-93 release you should be talking to your sales rep about the tentative features of this product. They can be reached at 800-448-2500. Name: STI Document Browser Product: MS-Windows 3.1 (shipping), NeXTstep/X11/VMS (in the pipeline) Platform: Contact: info@sti.fi Author: Stream Technologies Inc Comments: [ Ed Anselmo 31-Dec-1992 ] Product name: STI Document Browser Platforms: How and where to get: Stream Technologies Inc. Valkjarventie 2 SF-02130 Espoo FINLAND Tel: +358 0 43577340 Fax: +358 0 43577348 E-Mail: info@sti.fi Name: Super-TCP Product: protocol stack + MUA Platform: MS-Windows Contact: TCP@FrontierTech.COM Author: Frontier Technologies Comments: [ Ray C Langford 28-Apr-1993 ] Frontier Technologies' Super-TCP for MS-Windows includes MIME support in their E-Mail mail system that is a part of the Super-TCP for Windows package. Super-TCP for Windows is a Windows Sockets compliant, 100% DLL implementation that can also operate in a TSR mode. Applications include: Network News Reader, Telnet, FTP Client/Server, NFS Client/Server, SMTP/POP2&3 MIME E-Mail, Telnet Redirector, Interactive Talk, and more. Options are also available for PPP, X.25, and OSI. With the MIME support in E-Mail, any type of binary file may be attached to your message, including Postscript files, spreadsheet files, database files, word processor files, graphic files, audio files, and digital video files. The packages in the Super-TCP product line that include the E-Mail (SMTP/POP2&3) with MIME support are: - Super-TCP for Windows Version 3.0 (Complete TCP/IP package) - Super-TCP/NFS for Windows Version 3.0 (Complete TCP/IP package with NFS client/server) - Super-TCP Applications for Windows Version 3.0 (Windows Sockets applications only) For further information, e-mail TCP@FrontierTech.COM or call +1 414 241-4555. [ "Carl S. Gutekunst" 31-Oct-1994 ] The current release of SuperTCP is 4.00R2. The stack no longer supports a TSR mode. Their MIME MUA is considerably improved in this release. Name: TCP/Connect II version 2.0 Product: MUA, news reader Platform: Macintosh Contact: sales@intercon.com Author: InterCon Systems Corporation Comments: [ Amanda Walker 6-Sep-1994 ] Full support for MIME in email, viewing support for MIME in news. Includes inline composition and display of the following MIME content types: text/plain image/gif video/quicktime text/richtext image/jpeg audio/basic text/enriched image/x-macpict application/applefile application/x-macbinhex40 multipart/mixed character sets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 Provides drag & drop support for file enclosures, automatic encoding and decoding of AppleSingle/AppleDouble ("MacMIME") body parts, as well as BinHex & uuencode for backward compatibility. Runs native on Power Macintosh computers. For more information please contact: InterCon Systems Corporation 950 Herndon Parkway Herndon, VA 22070 USA +1 703 709 5500 (voice) +1 703 709 5555 (fax) sales@intercon.com (Internet email) [ Dave Saunders 7-Mar-1995 ] To add to the list of contact information: http://www.intercon.com/ ftp://ftp.intercon.com/ Additionally, we have a Windows product which also is MIME aware. It does not have the nifty display features that the Mac product has though... Name: Z-Mail Product: MUA Platform: Unix Contact: info@z-code.com Author: Z-Code Software Corporation Comments: [ Carlyn M. Lowery 29-May-1993 ] Z-Mail, a Unix World Magazine "Product of the Year" winner for 1991, is a complete electronic mail system for workstations. Z-Mail provides Motif and Open Look graphical user interfaces, as well as two character modes. The software has been ported to nearly every system that runs Unix, and it works with all standard Unix mail transport agents including sendmail, binmail, smail, MMDF and X.400 gateways. Z-Mail can replace or coexist with standard mail user agents on the system, including BSD Mail, AT&T mailx, Sun Mail Tool, Elm, or Mush. Most anyone can use Z-Mail "off the shelf" and immediately benefit from its simple interface and advanced features. Z-Mail also includes Z-Script, a powerful scripting language that enables users to customize and extend Z-Mail's capabilities. Z-Mail's multi-media capabilities allow easy integration with best-of-class products including spreadsheets, desk-top publishing, graphics, fax, voice, and video. For example, when users receive a spreadsheet file, Z-Mail can be configured to automatically launch the associated application and load the the attachment automatically and transparently to the user. Z-Mail understands MIME-format documents and is also compatible with Sun's multimedia Mailtool. Mac, MS-DOS, and MS-Windows versions, as well as native MIME support, are planned for this summer. For more information on Z-Mail, contact: Z-Code Software Corp. 4340 Redwood Hwy., Suite B-50 San Rafael, CA 94903 tel: (415) 499-8649 fax: (415) 479-0448 e-mail: info@z-code.com Also, you can anonymous-ftp a demo copy of Z-Mail from ftp://ora.com/pub/z-code/zmail/2.1/ (The file you want is named zm.XXX.tar.Z, where XXX is your type of machine.) You'll need to call us after you do so we can send you an activation key. -- 9) MIME and USENET news ----------------------- 9.1) Introduction USENET articles are (by design) very similar to RFC 822 mail messages. It is therefore reasonable to expect MIME software to be adopted for use on USENET. A number of the mail user agents and tools discussed in section 7 also handle USENET news. -------------------------------- 9.2) News readers and transports with MIME support Name: GNUS Product: reader Platform: GNU Emacs Where: Author: Masanobu UMEDA Comments: [ Masanobu UMEDA 07-Aug-1993 ] GNUS is an NNTP-based newsreader for GNU Emacs. GNUS versions 3.14.4 and later directly support reading of articles written in MIME format. It only requires the metamail package. Compositions of articles written in MIME format requires "mime.el" that is a part of MIME tools for GNU Emacs (see section 7.2). Name: gnus-mime.el Product: reaJoe Ilacqua der Platform: GNU Emacs Where: ftp://world.std.com/dist/gnus-mime.el.shar (also in the contrib tree of metamail) Author: Joe Ilacqua Comments: [ Joe Ilacqua 24-Jun-1993 ] "gnus-mime.el" is an ELISP package that adds support for MIME to GNUS. This is the second release: I consider it very beta, and I'm sure there are bugs, but it does work. It provides support both to read and to post USENET articles in MIME format. It's scarcest feature is support for multi-part multi-media ".signatures". { Gnus-mime.el may be for GNUS prior to version 3.14.4. } Name: INN Product: transport Platform: Where: Author: Comments: [ Christopher Davis 03-Jun-1993 ] There is some minimal MIME support in the INN package. Since INN is a transport system, not a newsreader, the support is for transferring MIME messages, not reading them. [ Christophe Wolfhugel 23-Jul-1993 ] INN's MIME support is today divided in two parts: 1) the possibility to have nnrpd add default MIME headers to locally posted articles; 2) transfer-encoding changes on transport with "innxmit", i.e. recode 8bit to quoted-printable. Name: MH Product: reader Platform: Where: See section 7 for MH's FTP sites. Author: Comments: [ John Romine 30-Jul-1993 ] If you compile MH to use NNTP, it can read news with its "bbc" command; MH supports MIME. Name: mhunify (aka stacknews) Product: reader Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhunify.shar.gz Author: Jerry Sweet Comments: [ Jerry Sweet 11-Aug-1994 ] Mhunify is a set of perl scripts and templates that provides shell-level MH functionality with USENET news. Since MH supports MIME, MIME-format news articles just work. I've found that being able to handle news in the same way that I handle e-mail is very useful, although there are some tradeoffs: no kill files, no threads, at least for now. Mhunify also treats MH folders just like news groups. If you subscribe to several mailing lists, and your e-mail is automatically delivered to separate folders, say, via procmail or via MMDF's .maildelivery, the mhunify package lets you progress automatically through your folders just as you would news groups. Requirements: - csh or some shell with shell-level alias or procedure facilities; - perl 4.0 or later; - MH 6.8 or later; - direct file system access to the USENET news spool directory (typically /usr/spool/news - as a local or NFS mounted file system). Some of the goodies: stacknews - read USENET news using shell-level MH. ncomp, nrepl, nforw - compose, reply to, and forward to USENET news groups (these use nwhatnow). nwhatnow - post USENET articles & send e-mail from the same draft. consider - creates a folder, +consider by default, containing specified messages. bburst - bursts digests into a writeable folder, +consider by default. clearf - clears the MH folder stack. mhpped - utility composition template pre-processor. pscan - scan messages from point of previous scan. Plus man pages, templates, example configuration files, other utility programs, and a Makefile to install everything. Name: nn Product: reader Platform: Where: Author: Comments: [ Luc Rooijakkers 26-Jul-1993 ] The current beta release of nn tags newly posted articles as text/plain; charset=xxx with transfer encoding 8bit if the message contains any 8 bit characters. Reading support needs further work. Name: SNews Product: reader Platform: MS-DOS OS/2 Where: ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/~ftp/pub/msdos/uupc/snews191.zip MS-DOS binaries Where: ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/~ftp/pub/msdos/uupc/snws191o.zip OS/2 binaries Where: ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/~ftp/pub/msdos/uupc/snws191s.zip Source Author: Comments: [ Daniel Fandrich 27-Aug-1993 ] Revision 1.91 of the SNews newsreader for MS-DOS systems fixes several bugs in version 1.90 (alpha), as well as adding some much-needed features, including built-in support for ISO 8859/1/2/3/4/9 character sets (RFC 1521 and RFC 1522) and a single key interface to the metamail MIME decoder (or other user-specified program). An additional bonus is the availability of an OS/2 version. Name: strn Product: reader Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/readers/trn/strn/strn092.tar.gz Author: Clifford A Adams Comments: Strn has support for reading and creating MIME articles. Name: trn Product: reader Platform: UNIX Where: ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/readers/trn/trn.tar.gz Author: Wayne Davison Comments: trn 3.0 has support for reading MIME articles with metamail, and creating them with mhn. -- End of Part 2 ************* -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,comp.answers,news.answers Path: news1.ucsd.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!library.ucla.edu!psgrain!news.uoregon.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!usenet.cis.ufl.edu!purdue!lerc.nasa.gov!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!usc!news.cerf.net!nntp2.cerf.net!shrike.irvine.com!jsweet From: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Subject: comp.mail.mime FAQ, part 3 of 3 (frequently asked questions list) Content-Type: message/partial; number=3; total=3; id="" References: Followup-To: comp.mail.mime Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Originator: jsweet@fester.irvine.com Sender: usenet@irvine.com (News Administration) Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: Irvine Compiler Corp., Irvine, California, USA Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 07:28:53 GMT Supersedes: Message-ID: Summary: This posting contains answers to some of the Frequently Asked Questions about MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Please read it before posting a question to comp.mail.mime. Expires: Mon, 1 Jan 1996 07:30:02 GMT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Lines: 702 Xref: news1.ucsd.edu comp.mail.mime:6522 comp.answers:12714 news.answers:49134 Archive-Name: mail/mime-faq/part3 Version: $Id: mime3,v 3.14 1995/09/03 06:14:01 jsweet Rel $ Posting-Frequency: monthly -- ========================================================== comp.mail.mime frequently asked questions list (FAQ) (3/3) ========================================================== Part 3: Advanced Topics ~~~~~~ -- Overview -------- This is part 3 of a Frequently Asked Questions document about MIME, the multipurpose and multi-media standard for Internet mail. Part 1 covers frequently asked questions. Part 2 is a listing of MIME products. Part 3 covers advanced topics. -- 10) Information --------------- 10.1) MIME-relevant RFCs and other standards The RFCs mentioned here are mainly relevant to persons building MIME software. As an end user, if your mail system is nice to you, you won't really have to know very much about these things. RFC and Internet-Drafts are available by anonymous FTP from any decent archive site. If you're really stuck, try these URLs: ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/ ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/ Additionally, RFCs may be requested from a mail-based archive server by sending a message to "mailserv@ds.internic.net". In the body of the message, include one of the following commands: document-by-name rfcNNNN document-by-name rfcNNNN.ps document-by-name rfc-index where NNNN is the number of an RFC to retrieve. Not all RFCs are available in PostScript (.ps) format. Retrieve the rfc-index to find out what's available. MIME is defined in RFC 1521 (MIME Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies) and RFC 1522 (Representation of Non-ASCII Text in Internet Message Headers). These are Internet standards-track protocols. For the full implications of this, see RFC 1780 (Internet Official Protocol Standards). Here is their current status. RFC 1521: Draft Elective Standard RFC 1522: Draft Elective Standard These two RFCs do not fully define MIME. For one thing, they are based on RFC 822 (Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages), as revised by RFC 1123 (Requirements for Internet hosts - application and support) and must be read in conjunction with these. For another, they are extensible. See 10.2 for a list of registered subtypes. Many other RFCs deal with e-mail, including these: IAB standards or standards-track RFCs RFC 1767 MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects RFC 1740 MIME Encapsulation of Macintosh files - MacMIME RFC 1734 POP3 AUTHentication command RFC 1731 IMAP4 Authentication mechanisms RFC 1730 Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4 RFC 1725 Post Office Protocol - Version 3 RFC 1700 Assigned Numbers { Way more than the title implies. } RFC 1653 SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration RFC 1652 SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport RFC 1651 SMTP Service Extensions RFC 1544 The Content-MD5 Header Field RFC 1502 X.400 Use of Extended Character Sets RFC 1496 Rules for Downgrading Messages from X.400(88) to X.400(84) when MIME Content-Types are Present in the Messages RFC 1495 Mapping between X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies RFC 1494 Equivalences between 1988 X.400 and RFC-922 Message Bodies RFC 1424 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part IV RFC 1423 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part III RFC 1422 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II RFC 1421 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I RFC 1327 Mapping between X.400(1988)/ISO 10021 and RFC 822 RFC 1314 File format for the exchange of images in the Internet Other RFCs (Informational, Experimental, or Historical) RFC 1838 Use of the X.500 Directory to support mapping between X.400 and RFC 822 Addresses RFC 1830 SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages RFC 1820 Multimedia E-mail (MIME) User Agent Checklist RFC 1815 Character Sets ISO-10646 and ISO-10646-J-1 RFC 1806 Communicating Presentation Information in Internet Messages: The Content-Disposition Header RFC 1741 MIME Content Type for BinHex Encoded Files RFC 1733 Distributed Electronic Mail Models in IMAP4 RFC 1732 IMAP4 Compatibility With IMAP2 and IMAP2bis RFC 1641 Using Unicode with MIME RFC 1590 Media Type Registration Procedure RFC 1563 The text/enriched MIME Content-type RFC 1557 Korean Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC 1556 Handling of Bi-directional Texts in MIME RFC 1555 Hebrew Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC 1524 A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information RFC 1506 A tutorial on gatewaying between X.400 and Internet mail RFC 1505 Encoding Header Field for Internet Messages RFC 1489 Registration of a Cyrillic Character Set RFC 1468 Japanese Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC 1456 Conventions for Encoding the Vietnamese Language RFC 1428 Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8bit-SMTP/MIME RFC 1357 Format for emailing bibliographic records RFC 1345 Character Mnemonics & Character Sets RFC 1344 Implications of MIME for Internet mail gateways RFC 1339 Remote mail checking protocol RFC 1321 MD5 Message-Digest algorithm RFC 1211 Problems with the maintenance of large mailing lists RFC 1197 Using ODA for translating multimedia information RFC 1176 Interactive Mail Access Protocol: Version 2 RFC 1153 Digest message format RFC 1036 Standard for interchange of USENET messages RFC 0934 Proposed standard for message encapsulation RFC 0822 Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages RFC 0821 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol RFC 0807 Multimedia mail meeting notes -------------------------------- 10.2) MIME types There are registered and unregistered MIME types. Unregistered MIME types begin with an "x-" and their meanings generally depend on private agreements between senders and receivers. This section lists registered types and some known unregistered types. -------------------------------- 10.2.1) List of registered MIME types The latest list of registered MIME types is available from this file: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/media-types The media-types file also lists character sets registered for use with MIME, access types for external-body contents, content-transfer-encodings, and MIME/X.400 mapping tables. A list of URLs follows for documents relevant to various media types. The media types are taken from the June, 1995 version of the aforementioned media-types file, but the URLs below aren't necessarily representative of the latest list of registered types. In general, each has a directory whose name has this form: media-types// The directory contains the definitions of the subtypes of the given /. Application types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/activemessage ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/andrew-inset ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/applefile ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/atomicmail ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/commonground ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/cybercash ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/dec-dx ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/dca-rft ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/eshop ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/iges ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/mac-binhex40 ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/macwriteii ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/mathematica ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/msword ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/news-message-id ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/news-transmission ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/octet-stream ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/oda ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/pdf ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/postscript ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/remote-printing ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/riscos ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/rtf ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/slate ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/wita ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/wordperfect5.1 ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/zip Audio types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/audio/basic Image types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/jpeg ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/gif ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/ief ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/tiff Message types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/external-body ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/partial ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/rfc822 ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/news Multipart types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/alternative ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/appledouble ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/digest ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/header-set ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/mixed ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/parallel Text types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/enriched ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/plain ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/richtext ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separated-values Video types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/video/mpeg ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/video/quicktime Character sets: See RFC 1700 for the latest list of registered character sets. These character sets are known to be registered at the time of this writing: ISO-8859-1 see ISO_8859-1:1987 ISO-8859-2 see ISO_8859-2:1987 ISO-8859-3 see ISO_8859-3:1988 ISO-8859-4 see ISO_8859-4:1988 ISO-8859-5 see ISO_8859-5:1988 ISO-8859-6 see ISO_8859-6:1987 ISO-8859-7 see ISO_8859-7:1987 ISO-8859-8 see ISO_8859-8:1988 ISO-8859-9 see ISO_8859-9:1989 US-ASCII see ANSI_X3.4-1968 Access types for external contents: AFS CMU Andrew File System (Transarc Corp., Pittsburgh, PA, USA) ANON-FTP anonymous FTP (RFC 1635, RFC 959) FTP non-anonymous FTP (RFC 959) LOCAL-FILE directly retrievable file MAIL-SERVER request to a mail-based archive server TFTP trivial file transfer protocol (RFC 1350) Content transfer encodings: 7BIT BINARY 8BIT QUOTED-PRINTABLE BASE64 -------------------------------- 10.2.2) List of known unregistered MIME types Here is a list of some known x-types, x-subtypes, and x-parameters. The enumeration of these x-types here does not imply any kind of standardization or open specification. The meanings of x-types depend on private agreements between senders and receivers. Some x-types may eventually become registered types; see sections 10.2.1 and 11.1. Just because an x-type is generated by a proprietary mail user agent doesn't necessarily mean that only that MUA can handle the x-type. Metamail and MH, for example, permit you to set up your own mechanisms to handle various standard and non-standard content types. In particular, it may simply be a matter of invoking some commercial application (aka invoking an "external viewer") to view data used by that application. For example, FrameMaker or FrameReader might be run to handle a content type of application/x-framemaker. (In the case of Frame documents, there are several ways to handle this---see Frame Technical Note 1359 or consult the comp.text.frame FAQ.) The Metamail source distribution comes with pre-defined mailcap entries for handling some x-types; these may offer clues about how to configure your own mail user agent. Not all of the x-types listed here begin with "x-". Although such non-standard types may contravene the MIME specification, the fact remains that someone out there is generating them. Listing such types here is not intended to enshrine such types. { NOTE: some of the meanings of these x-types are GUESSES by the FAQ maintainer. Please let us know about incorrect guesses, and, if possible, supply a URL pointing to information about the x-type. And please feel free to let us know about whatever wacko or not-so-wacko x-types that your UAs may unleash on an unsuspecting world. If you have a URL for a document that describes the format, so much the better. Please at least let us know what applications are generating the x-types in question. } Application types: application/x-aiff Z-Mail: AIFF audio data application/x-bcpio MHonArc: bcpio data application/x-bitmap Z-Mail: X11 bitmaps application/x-cpio MHonArc: cpio archives application/x-csh MHonArc: csh scripts application/x-dvi MHonArc: TeX DVI data application/x-framemaker Z-Mail: FrameMaker documents application/x-gtar MHonArc: GNU tar archives application/x-hdf MHonArc: hdf data application/x-inventor Z-Mail: for Inventor files application/x-island-draw Z-Mail: IslandDraw files application/x-island-paint Z-Mail: IslandPaint files application/x-island-write Z-Mail: IslandWrite files application/x-jot Z-Mail: Jot documents application/x-latex MHonArc: LaTeX documents application/x-macbinhex40 TCP/Connect II: Mac BinHex 4.0 application/x-metamail-patch metamail: patches to metamail application/x-mif MHonArc: Frame MIF documents application/x-movie Z-Mail: MoviePlayer documents application/x-ms-tnef Worldtalk: proprietary "tunneling" type for MS Exchange application/x-netcdf MHonArc: netcdf data application/x-sgi Z-Mail: SGI ImageWorks documents application/x-sh MHonArc: sh scripts application/x-shar MHonArc: shell archives application/x-showcase Z-Mail: Showcase documents application/x-sv4cpio MHonArc: SVR4 cpio archives application/x-sv4crc MHonArc: SVR4 crc data application/x-tar MHonArc: tar archives application/x-tcl MHonArc: tcl programs application/x-tex MHonArc: TeX documents application/x-texinfo MHonArc: GNU texinfo documents application/x-troff MHonArc: plain troff documents application/x-troff-man MHonArc: troff -man documents application/x-troff-me MHonArc: troff -me documents application/x-troff-ms MHonArc: troff -ms documents application/x-ustar MHonArc: ustar data application/x-wais-source MHonArc: WAIS sources application/x-wingz Z-Mail: Wingz documents application/x-xpm1 Z-Mail: OL pixmap files application/x-wt-stf Worldtalk: proprietary "tunneling" type for Worldtalk application/x-zm-fax Z-Mail: Z-Fax documents Audio types: audio/x-aiff MHonArc: AIFF audio data audio/x-wav MHonArc: WAV audio data audio/x-macaudio Iride: NOT sampled Macintosh audio audio/x-next MH 6.8: self-describing audio data see ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.ps Image types: image/g3fax X.400 mapping to/from g3-facsimile [RFC 1494] image/x-cmu-raster MHonArc: CMU raster data image/x-fits FITS files (see part 2 for an xv patch) image/x-macpict TCP/Connect II, Iride: Macintosh PICT image/x-pbm MHonArc: portable bit map data image/x-pgm MHonArc: PGM data image/x-pict MHonArc: Mactinosh PICT data image/x-pnm MHonArc image/x-portable-anymap MHonArc image/x-portable-bitmap MHonArc image/x-portable-graymap MHonArc image/x-portable-pixmap MHonArc image/x-ppm MHonArc image/x-rgb MHonArc image/x-xbitmap MHonArc: in-lines into the HTML image/x-xbm MHonArc: in-lines into the HTML image/x-xpixmap MHonArc image/x-xpm MHonArc image/x-xwd MHonArc image/x-xwindowdump MHonArc: X window dump Multipart types: multipart/report SendMail v8.7 Text types: text/html MHonArc: WWW HTML text/unknown Worldtalk text/x-html MHonArc: WWW HTML text/x-setext MHonArc: setext text/x-usenet-faq Ohio State WWW FAQ document format Video types: video/x-msvideo MHonArc: Microsoft video data video/x-sgi-movie MHonArc: SGI movie data Other types: x-be2 old Andrew format x-sun-attachment Sun MicroSystems mailtool x-zm-multipart old Z-Mail format Content transfer encodings: uue uuencoded data uuencode uuencoded data x-uue uuencoded data x-uuencode uuencoded data Character sets: charset=x-unknown MH 6.8.3: for untagged charsets Miscellaneous parameters: application/octet-stream type=tar; x-conversions=compress MH 6.8.x viamail: See also tar(1) and compress(1). -------------------------------- 10.3) Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups The IETF working group on Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM) has developed extensions that permit confidentiality, authentication, and integrity to be provided in a manner backwards compatible with RFC 821 and RFC 822. Work is underway to align PEM and MIME which will provide real security to MIME e-mail. The IETF MIME working group is not actively considering significant changes to the specifications. However the WG still exists as a forum for MIME developers, as a home for interpretation questions, and to handle any problems or ambiguities that might arise in MIME. -- 11) Developers' FAQs -------------------- 11.1) How can I register a new MIME type? The procedures for registering new content types, character set values, access types, and conversions parameters with IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) are documented in RFC 1590. [ "Harald T. Alvestrand" 27-Oct-94 ] I put up a few words on how I understand the current MIME body part registration procedures on http://domen.uninett.no/~hta/mimestuff/media-types.html The Web version includes hyperlinks to the relevant IANA archives and RFCs. -------------------------------- 11.2) What's ESMTP, and how does it affect MIME? ESMTP (Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a mechanism by which extensions to "traditional" (RFC 821) SMTP can be negotiated by client and server. The mechanism (RFC 1651) is open-ended; so far two extensions have been defined. Message size declaration (RFC 1653) offers a graceful way for servers to limit the size of message they are prepared to accept. (With SMTP, the only possibility is for the server to discard the message after it has been sent in its entirety. There is no way for the client to know that it was the size of the message that caused the problem.) When a message is returned to the user as being too large to deliver, one possible approach might be to fragment the message using the MIME Message/Partial mechanism, and resubmit it. Depending on the exact reason for the "too large" rejection, this may or may not be a good idea. For example, the limitation may reflect the recipient's disk quota, in which case the fragmented message will not be fully deliverable either. The possibility of fragmentation should, therefore, be left to the user's discretion (not performed automatically by the SMTP client). 8bit-MIMEtransport (RFC 1652) opens up the possibility of sending 8bit data in mail messages, without having to use base64, quoted-printable, or another encoding, and without the breakage that can result from sending 8bit data to an unsuspecting RFC 821 SMTP server. RFC 1428 (Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8bit-SMTP/MIME) discusses some of the implications of this. -------------------------------- 11.3) Where can I get some sample MIME messages? Here are two sources: ftp://thumper.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/samples/ http://www-dsed.llnl.gov/documents/tests/email.html Here're more sources: [ Patrik Faltstrom 13-Dec-1994 ] At 12:55 AM 12/11/94, Richard Willis wrote: >Could someone tell me what the address of the person in Sweden >is who kindly provided a set of MIME-conformancy tests via >listserver... My address is paf@bunyip.com, and the address of the listserver is mimeback@bunyip.com. Send the command (actually the name of the file you want) as the subject in the message. Start with the command "HELP". [ "Erik Huizer (SURFnet BV)" 20-Jan-1995 ] Test messages can be requested in the following way: Send mail to with a subject field containing [ a type/subtype designation, or one of these: ] X-local nested iso-8859-1 A message containing the requested content-type will be returned to the address contained in the from field. -------------------------------- 11.4) Wouldn't MIME be better if it did ? This question is asked for various values of . Perhaps the most common is "multilevel encodings": see the next question. There are a couple general points that apply to all . 1. Please remember that MIME is the result of a lot of work by a lot of persons, over a long time (look at the Acknowledgements section of RFC 1521). A great many ideas, probably including yours, were considered. In many cases, there were conflicting goals, such as simplicity and interoperability on the one hand, and power and flexibility on the other. 2. If you really think you've got an original idea which would improve MIME, the correct place to pursue it is not this newsgroup, but the working group mailing list (having first read the archives, to check that it really is new). Yes, this is going to be a lot more work than posting a news article. -------------------------------- 11.5) So what about multilevel encodings? MIME uses a two-level encoding scheme. The original object (for example, a picture, or a text document) is encoded using a well defined mechanism appropriate to that object (perhaps GIF for the picture, and text/enriched for the document). Then a second encoding is used to ensure that the first encoding can be transmitted intact (probably base64 for the GIF, and quoted printable for the text/enriched document). Note that there is a very small number of the second encodings (five, but three of these are simply indications of what kind of data an unencoded body part contains), and it is not expected that there will be many more in the foreseeable future. The multilevel encodings idea is for a more generalized MIME-like encoding mechanism that could indicate many arbitrary transformations of the original object. For example, Content-Type: application/tar; conversions="encrypt,compress,uuencode" might indicate a UNIX tar file that had been encrypted, then compressed, then uuencoded. (This is a fictitious example of how MIME might have worked; it's not legal MIME. Don't worry if you've never heard of some of these transformations.) This may look like an attractive scheme at first, but it has a number of problems. 1. If you've been brought up on UNIX and command pipelines, the implementation of such a scheme seems trivial. Surely any half-decent machine can do something similar? Unfortunately, this turns out to be true only for a very restricted definition of "half-decent". In practice, it would be awfully difficult to implement this on a lot of systems. Probably even more systems would not allow new transformations to be just "slotted in", and would require recompilation or reshipping whenever a new one came along. 2. Each successive transformation reduces the size of the audience who can successfully decode the message. Every MIME mailer must be able to decode base64 and quoted-printable, so it's guaranteed that you can at least get back to the raw data. What if, in the above example, I have tar, decrypt, uudecode, but no uncompressor? 3. Such a scheme does not increase the scope of the framework defined by MIME. If uuencoded, compressed, encrypted tar files are useful things to sling around, it is entirely possible to define a new MIME type (presumably a subtype of application) to handle them. -------------------------------- 11.6) Why doesn't MIME include a mechanism for compression? Compression is a difficult area. It was considered by the working group, but no consensus was reached. There is still work going on in this area: there may someday be a compressed-64 encoding. Most compression algorithms have one of more of these undesirable properties: they are covered by patent, they require the ability to treat the input as a stream of bits, they use a large data space. The chances of finding a truly interoperable compression algorithm are therefore rather slim. It is worth noting that most or all of the image and video subtypes (including GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and MPEG) define their own compression schemes. -------------------------------- 11.7) What's this Content-Disposition header? It's a way to specify what needs to be done with a MIME content, such as storing it in a file with a particular name, or displaying it. For information about Content-Disposition, see RFC 1806, written by Steve Dorner and Rens Troost. -- 12) Acknowledgements -------------------- In addition to those named elsewhere in this document, contributors have included: Alan Robiette, Alec Henderson, Axel Boldt, Carlyn Lowery, Chris Pepper, Christophe Wolfhugel, Christopher Davis, Craig Huckabee, Daniel Fandrich, Daniel Glazman, Dave Curry, Dave Lacey, David Barr, David Collier-Brown, David Eaves, David Miller, Douglas Boyce, Ed Anselmo, Ed Greshko, Edward Vielmetti, Erik van der Poel, Gisle Hannemyr, Harald Alvestrand, Ian Hoyle, James Ford, Jason Beyer, Jay Weber, Jerry Peek, Jerry Sweet, Joe Ilacqua, Joergen Haegg, John Gardiner Myers, John Martin, John R MacMillan, John Romine, Joyce Reynolds, Keith Moore, Larry Salomon Jr, Larry W. Virden, Lars-Gunnar Olsson, Luc Rooijakkers, Marc VanHeyningen, Mark Crispin, Mark Grand, Marshall Rose, Martin Wendel, Masanobu Umeda, Michael Parson, Michael Shields, Michael Urban, Nathaniel Borenstein, Ned Freed, Niklas Agren, Olle Jarnefors, Pat Farrell, Paul Eggert, Piero Serini, Quentin Smart, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim, Ran Atkinson, Ray Langford, Rich Ragan, Rick Troth, Roman Czyborra, Ron Barak, Sascha Wildner, Steve Dorner, Steve Hole, Stuart Lynne, Susan Straub, Syd Weinstein, Tim Goodwin, Tim Kehres, Tommy Wallo, Yehavi Bourvine. If we've left your name off, please accept our apologies. Drop us a note and we'll include it for next time. Thanks also to the University of California, Irvine, Department of Information and Computer Science, Einar Stefferud, and Irvine Compiler Corp., for providing the resources for maintaining this FAQ; and to Jonathan Kamens, for coordinating the *.answers groups, and for his post_faq program which brought you this FAQ. 13) Permissions --------------- Permission is granted for non-profit redistribution of the unedited comp.mail.mime FAQ. For-profit redistribution of the unedited comp.mail.mime FAQ is presently permitted, but the maintainers request that you notify them. (For this purpose, commercial USENET newsfeeds, bboards, and other electronic or physical media distributions that incidentally include this FAQ as part of a full re-distribution of the newsgroups in which the FAQ appears, needn't notify us.) -- End of Part 3 ************* -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,comp.answers,news.answers Path: news1.ucsd.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!ucsnews!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.uoregon.edu!news.kreonet.re.kr!usenet.seri.re.kr!news.imnet.ad.jp!news.join.ad.jp!news.caren.net!hookup!lll-winken.llnl.gov!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!news.cerf.net!nntp2.cerf.net!shrike.irvine.com!jsweet From: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Subject: comp.mail.mime FAQ, part 3 of 3 (frequently asked questions list) Content-Type: message/partial; number=3; total=3; id="" References: Followup-To: comp.mail.mime Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Originator: jsweet@fester.irvine.com Sender: usenet@irvine.com (News Administration) Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: Irvine Compiler Corp., Irvine, California, USA Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 07:28:42 GMT Supersedes: Message-ID: Summary: This posting contains answers to some of the Frequently Asked Questions about MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Please read it before posting a question to comp.mail.mime. Expires: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 07:30:01 GMT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Lines: 702 Xref: news1.ucsd.edu comp.mail.mime:6670 comp.answers:13047 news.answers:50817 Archive-Name: mail/mime-faq/part3 Version: $Id: mime3,v 3.14 1995/09/03 06:14:01 jsweet Rel $ Posting-Frequency: monthly -- ========================================================== comp.mail.mime frequently asked questions list (FAQ) (3/3) ========================================================== Part 3: Advanced Topics ~~~~~~ -- Overview -------- This is part 3 of a Frequently Asked Questions document about MIME, the multipurpose and multi-media standard for Internet mail. Part 1 covers frequently asked questions. Part 2 is a listing of MIME products. Part 3 covers advanced topics. -- 10) Information --------------- 10.1) MIME-relevant RFCs and other standards The RFCs mentioned here are mainly relevant to persons building MIME software. As an end user, if your mail system is nice to you, you won't really have to know very much about these things. RFC and Internet-Drafts are available by anonymous FTP from any decent archive site. If you're really stuck, try these URLs: ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/ ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/ Additionally, RFCs may be requested from a mail-based archive server by sending a message to "mailserv@ds.internic.net". In the body of the message, include one of the following commands: document-by-name rfcNNNN document-by-name rfcNNNN.ps document-by-name rfc-index where NNNN is the number of an RFC to retrieve. Not all RFCs are available in PostScript (.ps) format. Retrieve the rfc-index to find out what's available. MIME is defined in RFC 1521 (MIME Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies) and RFC 1522 (Representation of Non-ASCII Text in Internet Message Headers). These are Internet standards-track protocols. For the full implications of this, see RFC 1780 (Internet Official Protocol Standards). Here is their current status. RFC 1521: Draft Elective Standard RFC 1522: Draft Elective Standard These two RFCs do not fully define MIME. For one thing, they are based on RFC 822 (Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages), as revised by RFC 1123 (Requirements for Internet hosts - application and support) and must be read in conjunction with these. For another, they are extensible. See 10.2 for a list of registered subtypes. Many other RFCs deal with e-mail, including these: IAB standards or standards-track RFCs RFC 1767 MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects RFC 1740 MIME Encapsulation of Macintosh files - MacMIME RFC 1734 POP3 AUTHentication command RFC 1731 IMAP4 Authentication mechanisms RFC 1730 Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4 RFC 1725 Post Office Protocol - Version 3 RFC 1700 Assigned Numbers { Way more than the title implies. } RFC 1653 SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration RFC 1652 SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport RFC 1651 SMTP Service Extensions RFC 1544 The Content-MD5 Header Field RFC 1502 X.400 Use of Extended Character Sets RFC 1496 Rules for Downgrading Messages from X.400(88) to X.400(84) when MIME Content-Types are Present in the Messages RFC 1495 Mapping between X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies RFC 1494 Equivalences between 1988 X.400 and RFC-922 Message Bodies RFC 1424 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part IV RFC 1423 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part III RFC 1422 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II RFC 1421 Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I RFC 1327 Mapping between X.400(1988)/ISO 10021 and RFC 822 RFC 1314 File format for the exchange of images in the Internet Other RFCs (Informational, Experimental, or Historical) RFC 1838 Use of the X.500 Directory to support mapping between X.400 and RFC 822 Addresses RFC 1830 SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages RFC 1820 Multimedia E-mail (MIME) User Agent Checklist RFC 1815 Character Sets ISO-10646 and ISO-10646-J-1 RFC 1806 Communicating Presentation Information in Internet Messages: The Content-Disposition Header RFC 1741 MIME Content Type for BinHex Encoded Files RFC 1733 Distributed Electronic Mail Models in IMAP4 RFC 1732 IMAP4 Compatibility With IMAP2 and IMAP2bis RFC 1641 Using Unicode with MIME RFC 1590 Media Type Registration Procedure RFC 1563 The text/enriched MIME Content-type RFC 1557 Korean Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC 1556 Handling of Bi-directional Texts in MIME RFC 1555 Hebrew Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC 1524 A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information RFC 1506 A tutorial on gatewaying between X.400 and Internet mail RFC 1505 Encoding Header Field for Internet Messages RFC 1489 Registration of a Cyrillic Character Set RFC 1468 Japanese Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC 1456 Conventions for Encoding the Vietnamese Language RFC 1428 Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8bit-SMTP/MIME RFC 1357 Format for emailing bibliographic records RFC 1345 Character Mnemonics & Character Sets RFC 1344 Implications of MIME for Internet mail gateways RFC 1339 Remote mail checking protocol RFC 1321 MD5 Message-Digest algorithm RFC 1211 Problems with the maintenance of large mailing lists RFC 1197 Using ODA for translating multimedia information RFC 1176 Interactive Mail Access Protocol: Version 2 RFC 1153 Digest message format RFC 1036 Standard for interchange of USENET messages RFC 0934 Proposed standard for message encapsulation RFC 0822 Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages RFC 0821 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol RFC 0807 Multimedia mail meeting notes -------------------------------- 10.2) MIME types There are registered and unregistered MIME types. Unregistered MIME types begin with an "x-" and their meanings generally depend on private agreements between senders and receivers. This section lists registered types and some known unregistered types. -------------------------------- 10.2.1) List of registered MIME types The latest list of registered MIME types is available from this file: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/media-types The media-types file also lists character sets registered for use with MIME, access types for external-body contents, content-transfer-encodings, and MIME/X.400 mapping tables. A list of URLs follows for documents relevant to various media types. The media types are taken from the June, 1995 version of the aforementioned media-types file, but the URLs below aren't necessarily representative of the latest list of registered types. In general, each has a directory whose name has this form: media-types// The directory contains the definitions of the subtypes of the given /. Application types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/activemessage ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/andrew-inset ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/applefile ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/atomicmail ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/commonground ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/cybercash ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/dec-dx ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/dca-rft ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/eshop ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/iges ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/mac-binhex40 ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/macwriteii ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/mathematica ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/msword ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/news-message-id ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/news-transmission ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/octet-stream ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/oda ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/pdf ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/postscript ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/remote-printing ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/riscos ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/rtf ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/slate ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/wita ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/wordperfect5.1 ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/zip Audio types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/audio/basic Image types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/jpeg ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/gif ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/ief ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/tiff Message types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/external-body ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/partial ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/rfc822 ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/message/news Multipart types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/alternative ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/appledouble ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/digest ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/header-set ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/mixed ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/parallel Text types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/enriched ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/plain ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/richtext ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separated-values Video types: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/video/mpeg ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/video/quicktime Character sets: See RFC 1700 for the latest list of registered character sets. These character sets are known to be registered at the time of this writing: ISO-8859-1 see ISO_8859-1:1987 ISO-8859-2 see ISO_8859-2:1987 ISO-8859-3 see ISO_8859-3:1988 ISO-8859-4 see ISO_8859-4:1988 ISO-8859-5 see ISO_8859-5:1988 ISO-8859-6 see ISO_8859-6:1987 ISO-8859-7 see ISO_8859-7:1987 ISO-8859-8 see ISO_8859-8:1988 ISO-8859-9 see ISO_8859-9:1989 US-ASCII see ANSI_X3.4-1968 Access types for external contents: AFS CMU Andrew File System (Transarc Corp., Pittsburgh, PA, USA) ANON-FTP anonymous FTP (RFC 1635, RFC 959) FTP non-anonymous FTP (RFC 959) LOCAL-FILE directly retrievable file MAIL-SERVER request to a mail-based archive server TFTP trivial file transfer protocol (RFC 1350) Content transfer encodings: 7BIT BINARY 8BIT QUOTED-PRINTABLE BASE64 -------------------------------- 10.2.2) List of known unregistered MIME types Here is a list of some known x-types, x-subtypes, and x-parameters. The enumeration of these x-types here does not imply any kind of standardization or open specification. The meanings of x-types depend on private agreements between senders and receivers. Some x-types may eventually become registered types; see sections 10.2.1 and 11.1. Just because an x-type is generated by a proprietary mail user agent doesn't necessarily mean that only that MUA can handle the x-type. Metamail and MH, for example, permit you to set up your own mechanisms to handle various standard and non-standard content types. In particular, it may simply be a matter of invoking some commercial application (aka invoking an "external viewer") to view data used by that application. For example, FrameMaker or FrameReader might be run to handle a content type of application/x-framemaker. (In the case of Frame documents, there are several ways to handle this---see Frame Technical Note 1359 or consult the comp.text.frame FAQ.) The Metamail source distribution comes with pre-defined mailcap entries for handling some x-types; these may offer clues about how to configure your own mail user agent. Not all of the x-types listed here begin with "x-". Although such non-standard types may contravene the MIME specification, the fact remains that someone out there is generating them. Listing such types here is not intended to enshrine such types. { NOTE: some of the meanings of these x-types are GUESSES by the FAQ maintainer. Please let us know about incorrect guesses, and, if possible, supply a URL pointing to information about the x-type. And please feel free to let us know about whatever wacko or not-so-wacko x-types that your UAs may unleash on an unsuspecting world. If you have a URL for a document that describes the format, so much the better. Please at least let us know what applications are generating the x-types in question. } Application types: application/x-aiff Z-Mail: AIFF audio data application/x-bcpio MHonArc: bcpio data application/x-bitmap Z-Mail: X11 bitmaps application/x-cpio MHonArc: cpio archives application/x-csh MHonArc: csh scripts application/x-dvi MHonArc: TeX DVI data application/x-framemaker Z-Mail: FrameMaker documents application/x-gtar MHonArc: GNU tar archives application/x-hdf MHonArc: hdf data application/x-inventor Z-Mail: for Inventor files application/x-island-draw Z-Mail: IslandDraw files application/x-island-paint Z-Mail: IslandPaint files application/x-island-write Z-Mail: IslandWrite files application/x-jot Z-Mail: Jot documents application/x-latex MHonArc: LaTeX documents application/x-macbinhex40 TCP/Connect II: Mac BinHex 4.0 application/x-metamail-patch metamail: patches to metamail application/x-mif MHonArc: Frame MIF documents application/x-movie Z-Mail: MoviePlayer documents application/x-ms-tnef Worldtalk: proprietary "tunneling" type for MS Exchange application/x-netcdf MHonArc: netcdf data application/x-sgi Z-Mail: SGI ImageWorks documents application/x-sh MHonArc: sh scripts application/x-shar MHonArc: shell archives application/x-showcase Z-Mail: Showcase documents application/x-sv4cpio MHonArc: SVR4 cpio archives application/x-sv4crc MHonArc: SVR4 crc data application/x-tar MHonArc: tar archives application/x-tcl MHonArc: tcl programs application/x-tex MHonArc: TeX documents application/x-texinfo MHonArc: GNU texinfo documents application/x-troff MHonArc: plain troff documents application/x-troff-man MHonArc: troff -man documents application/x-troff-me MHonArc: troff -me documents application/x-troff-ms MHonArc: troff -ms documents application/x-ustar MHonArc: ustar data application/x-wais-source MHonArc: WAIS sources application/x-wingz Z-Mail: Wingz documents application/x-xpm1 Z-Mail: OL pixmap files application/x-wt-stf Worldtalk: proprietary "tunneling" type for Worldtalk application/x-zm-fax Z-Mail: Z-Fax documents Audio types: audio/x-aiff MHonArc: AIFF audio data audio/x-wav MHonArc: WAV audio data audio/x-macaudio Iride: NOT sampled Macintosh audio audio/x-next MH 6.8: self-describing audio data see ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mh/contrib/multimedia/mhn-tutorial.ps Image types: image/g3fax X.400 mapping to/from g3-facsimile [RFC 1494] image/x-cmu-raster MHonArc: CMU raster data image/x-fits FITS files (see part 2 for an xv patch) image/x-macpict TCP/Connect II, Iride: Macintosh PICT image/x-pbm MHonArc: portable bit map data image/x-pgm MHonArc: PGM data image/x-pict MHonArc: Mactinosh PICT data image/x-pnm MHonArc image/x-portable-anymap MHonArc image/x-portable-bitmap MHonArc image/x-portable-graymap MHonArc image/x-portable-pixmap MHonArc image/x-ppm MHonArc image/x-rgb MHonArc image/x-xbitmap MHonArc: in-lines into the HTML image/x-xbm MHonArc: in-lines into the HTML image/x-xpixmap MHonArc image/x-xpm MHonArc image/x-xwd MHonArc image/x-xwindowdump MHonArc: X window dump Multipart types: multipart/report SendMail v8.7 Text types: text/html MHonArc: WWW HTML text/unknown Worldtalk text/x-html MHonArc: WWW HTML text/x-setext MHonArc: setext text/x-usenet-faq Ohio State WWW FAQ document format Video types: video/x-msvideo MHonArc: Microsoft video data video/x-sgi-movie MHonArc: SGI movie data Other types: x-be2 old Andrew format x-sun-attachment Sun MicroSystems mailtool x-zm-multipart old Z-Mail format Content transfer encodings: uue uuencoded data uuencode uuencoded data x-uue uuencoded data x-uuencode uuencoded data Character sets: charset=x-unknown MH 6.8.3: for untagged charsets Miscellaneous parameters: application/octet-stream type=tar; x-conversions=compress MH 6.8.x viamail: See also tar(1) and compress(1). -------------------------------- 10.3) Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups The IETF working group on Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM) has developed extensions that permit confidentiality, authentication, and integrity to be provided in a manner backwards compatible with RFC 821 and RFC 822. Work is underway to align PEM and MIME which will provide real security to MIME e-mail. The IETF MIME working group is not actively considering significant changes to the specifications. However the WG still exists as a forum for MIME developers, as a home for interpretation questions, and to handle any problems or ambiguities that might arise in MIME. -- 11) Developers' FAQs -------------------- 11.1) How can I register a new MIME type? The procedures for registering new content types, character set values, access types, and conversions parameters with IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) are documented in RFC 1590. [ "Harald T. Alvestrand" 27-Oct-94 ] I put up a few words on how I understand the current MIME body part registration procedures on http://domen.uninett.no/~hta/mimestuff/media-types.html The Web version includes hyperlinks to the relevant IANA archives and RFCs. -------------------------------- 11.2) What's ESMTP, and how does it affect MIME? ESMTP (Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a mechanism by which extensions to "traditional" (RFC 821) SMTP can be negotiated by client and server. The mechanism (RFC 1651) is open-ended; so far two extensions have been defined. Message size declaration (RFC 1653) offers a graceful way for servers to limit the size of message they are prepared to accept. (With SMTP, the only possibility is for the server to discard the message after it has been sent in its entirety. There is no way for the client to know that it was the size of the message that caused the problem.) When a message is returned to the user as being too large to deliver, one possible approach might be to fragment the message using the MIME Message/Partial mechanism, and resubmit it. Depending on the exact reason for the "too large" rejection, this may or may not be a good idea. For example, the limitation may reflect the recipient's disk quota, in which case the fragmented message will not be fully deliverable either. The possibility of fragmentation should, therefore, be left to the user's discretion (not performed automatically by the SMTP client). 8bit-MIMEtransport (RFC 1652) opens up the possibility of sending 8bit data in mail messages, without having to use base64, quoted-printable, or another encoding, and without the breakage that can result from sending 8bit data to an unsuspecting RFC 821 SMTP server. RFC 1428 (Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8bit-SMTP/MIME) discusses some of the implications of this. -------------------------------- 11.3) Where can I get some sample MIME messages? Here are two sources: ftp://thumper.bellcore.com/pub/nsb/samples/ http://www-dsed.llnl.gov/documents/tests/email.html Here're more sources: [ Patrik Faltstrom 13-Dec-1994 ] At 12:55 AM 12/11/94, Richard Willis wrote: >Could someone tell me what the address of the person in Sweden >is who kindly provided a set of MIME-conformancy tests via >listserver... My address is paf@bunyip.com, and the address of the listserver is mimeback@bunyip.com. Send the command (actually the name of the file you want) as the subject in the message. Start with the command "HELP". [ "Erik Huizer (SURFnet BV)" 20-Jan-1995 ] Test messages can be requested in the following way: Send mail to with a subject field containing [ a type/subtype designation, or one of these: ] X-local nested iso-8859-1 A message containing the requested content-type will be returned to the address contained in the from field. -------------------------------- 11.4) Wouldn't MIME be better if it did ? This question is asked for various values of . Perhaps the most common is "multilevel encodings": see the next question. There are a couple general points that apply to all . 1. Please remember that MIME is the result of a lot of work by a lot of persons, over a long time (look at the Acknowledgements section of RFC 1521). A great many ideas, probably including yours, were considered. In many cases, there were conflicting goals, such as simplicity and interoperability on the one hand, and power and flexibility on the other. 2. If you really think you've got an original idea which would improve MIME, the correct place to pursue it is not this newsgroup, but the working group mailing list (having first read the archives, to check that it really is new). Yes, this is going to be a lot more work than posting a news article. -------------------------------- 11.5) So what about multilevel encodings? MIME uses a two-level encoding scheme. The original object (for example, a picture, or a text document) is encoded using a well defined mechanism appropriate to that object (perhaps GIF for the picture, and text/enriched for the document). Then a second encoding is used to ensure that the first encoding can be transmitted intact (probably base64 for the GIF, and quoted printable for the text/enriched document). Note that there is a very small number of the second encodings (five, but three of these are simply indications of what kind of data an unencoded body part contains), and it is not expected that there will be many more in the foreseeable future. The multilevel encodings idea is for a more generalized MIME-like encoding mechanism that could indicate many arbitrary transformations of the original object. For example, Content-Type: application/tar; conversions="encrypt,compress,uuencode" might indicate a UNIX tar file that had been encrypted, then compressed, then uuencoded. (This is a fictitious example of how MIME might have worked; it's not legal MIME. Don't worry if you've never heard of some of these transformations.) This may look like an attractive scheme at first, but it has a number of problems. 1. If you've been brought up on UNIX and command pipelines, the implementation of such a scheme seems trivial. Surely any half-decent machine can do something similar? Unfortunately, this turns out to be true only for a very restricted definition of "half-decent". In practice, it would be awfully difficult to implement this on a lot of systems. Probably even more systems would not allow new transformations to be just "slotted in", and would require recompilation or reshipping whenever a new one came along. 2. Each successive transformation reduces the size of the audience who can successfully decode the message. Every MIME mailer must be able to decode base64 and quoted-printable, so it's guaranteed that you can at least get back to the raw data. What if, in the above example, I have tar, decrypt, uudecode, but no uncompressor? 3. Such a scheme does not increase the scope of the framework defined by MIME. If uuencoded, compressed, encrypted tar files are useful things to sling around, it is entirely possible to define a new MIME type (presumably a subtype of application) to handle them. -------------------------------- 11.6) Why doesn't MIME include a mechanism for compression? Compression is a difficult area. It was considered by the working group, but no consensus was reached. There is still work going on in this area: there may someday be a compressed-64 encoding. Most compression algorithms have one of more of these undesirable properties: they are covered by patent, they require the ability to treat the input as a stream of bits, they use a large data space. The chances of finding a truly interoperable compression algorithm are therefore rather slim. It is worth noting that most or all of the image and video subtypes (including GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and MPEG) define their own compression schemes. -------------------------------- 11.7) What's this Content-Disposition header? It's a way to specify what needs to be done with a MIME content, such as storing it in a file with a particular name, or displaying it. For information about Content-Disposition, see RFC 1806, written by Steve Dorner and Rens Troost. -- 12) Acknowledgements -------------------- In addition to those named elsewhere in this document, contributors have included: Alan Robiette, Alec Henderson, Axel Boldt, Carlyn Lowery, Chris Pepper, Christophe Wolfhugel, Christopher Davis, Craig Huckabee, Daniel Fandrich, Daniel Glazman, Dave Curry, Dave Lacey, David Barr, David Collier-Brown, David Eaves, David Miller, Douglas Boyce, Ed Anselmo, Ed Greshko, Edward Vielmetti, Erik van der Poel, Gisle Hannemyr, Harald Alvestrand, Ian Hoyle, James Ford, Jason Beyer, Jay Weber, Jerry Peek, Jerry Sweet, Joe Ilacqua, Joergen Haegg, John Gardiner Myers, John Martin, John R MacMillan, John Romine, Joyce Reynolds, Keith Moore, Larry Salomon Jr, Larry W. Virden, Lars-Gunnar Olsson, Luc Rooijakkers, Marc VanHeyningen, Mark Crispin, Mark Grand, Marshall Rose, Martin Wendel, Masanobu Umeda, Michael Parson, Michael Shields, Michael Urban, Nathaniel Borenstein, Ned Freed, Niklas Agren, Olle Jarnefors, Pat Farrell, Paul Eggert, Piero Serini, Quentin Smart, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim, Ran Atkinson, Ray Langford, Rich Ragan, Rick Troth, Roman Czyborra, Ron Barak, Sascha Wildner, Steve Dorner, Steve Hole, Stuart Lynne, Susan Straub, Syd Weinstein, Tim Goodwin, Tim Kehres, Tommy Wallo, Yehavi Bourvine. If we've left your name off, please accept our apologies. Drop us a note and we'll include it for next time. Thanks also to the University of California, Irvine, Department of Information and Computer Science, Einar Stefferud, and Irvine Compiler Corp., for providing the resources for maintaining this FAQ; and to Jonathan Kamens, for coordinating the *.answers groups, and for his post_faq program which brought you this FAQ. 13) Permissions --------------- Permission is granted for non-profit redistribution of the unedited comp.mail.mime FAQ. For-profit redistribution of the unedited comp.mail.mime FAQ is presently permitted, but the maintainers request that you notify them. (For this purpose, commercial USENET newsfeeds, bboards, and other electronic or physical media distributions that incidentally include this FAQ as part of a full re-distribution of the newsgroups in which the FAQ appears, needn't notify us.) -- End of Part 3 ************* -- .