Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime,comp.answers,news.answers Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.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 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: Sat, 8 Jul 1995 06:29:18 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: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 06:30:01 GMT Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mime-faq@ics.uci.edu (MIME FAQ maintainer) Lines: 886 Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu comp.mail.mime:6541 comp.answers:12969 news.answers:48021 Archive-Name: mail/mime-faq/part1 Version: $Id: mime1,v 3.13 1995/05/13 22:26:15 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 2.4 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.) -------------------------------- 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 Other information: [ Arjan van der Meer 30-Jan-1995 ] Mail for more info: mime-DocServer@docserver.cac.washinton.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@thumper.bellcore.com - 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) which 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. 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. Any URLs referring to ftp.ics.uci.edu mentioned in this document can be used in formulating 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 ************* --