Email: ak272@freenet.acsu.buffalo.edu (NeXTmail or MIME)
This is to announce the phase one availibility of Echelon, a MIME compliant
graphical mail program (UA) for NEXTSTEP written by Douglas Boyce.
Accompanying this is a MAB compiled with 3.1 on Intel. Demo license are available 3 days for individuals (longer for corporate evaluation).
Consult the ordering file for pricing and order procedures. If you don't have ftp access or would like more information contact the author via telephone,
email, or regular mail.
What is MIME
MIME or (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extentions defined in RFC1521) is the
Internet version of NeXTmail that extendes its capability to allow enriched
text with non US-ASCII character sets, video, images, audio, and very large
messages to sent over 7bit links. It does this without depending on standard
UNIX programs or encodings.
Capabilities of Echelon
NeXTmail
Echelon can decode, display, and compose NeXTmail.
MIME
Echelon understands the following MIME content/subtype pairs
Type Subtype Note
---- ------- ----
text plain
richtext
enriched
** US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 are fully supported.
ISO-8859-2 is paritially supported (all characters not found in the
NEXTSTEP encoding are substituted with the plain Latin character, i.e.
Zcaron will be replaced with 'Z')
multipart mixed
alternative Currently the user must choose
which alternate type to viewed.
Some type of heuristic approach
is forthcoming.
digest
parallel Treated as multipart/mixed
header-set Treated as multipart/mixed
message rfc822
partial Reassembles the fragmented messages
iff the mailbox isn't readonly
** message/external-body support is forthcoming
application octet-stream Regarding graphic files: If your system
can render the named file 'ball.rle'
because you have filters installed, and
you also have set the 'render graphics'
preferences, It will be rendered as if
it were image/x-rle.
postscript Placed in a '.ps' file to be rendered
by Preview.
rtf Placed in a '.rtf' file.
zip Placed in a '.zip' file. It is assumed
that the user has already retrieved a
program with the capabilities of
Opener 3.1 so the user can double click
to extract.
image jpeg
gif
tiff
** There are a number of MIME composers that produce illegal image subtypes
such as image/pgm as opposed to image/x-pgm. However, if the appropriate
filtering service is installed (i.e. ImageViewer) it can be rendered
audio basic Relys on Sound.app to play 8000 hertz
mono sounds.
video mpeg Placed in a '.mpg' file. The author
used MPEGPlay 2.3 to display mpeg's.
Echelon is filter-friendly.
Echelon supports changing the check-for-newmail from the spool mailfile to
local files. This allows it to coexist with publicly available filtering
packages such as procmail. It also uses the appropriate lockfile which the
user must set.
Echelon also support Berkeley flat file mailboxes
The caveat is that currently all berkeley mailboxes you wish to use must be
in the same directory (i.e. $(HOME)/Mail).
NeXTmail, and NEXTSTEP are trademarks of NeXT, Inc.
ImageViewer is a copyright of Lennart Lovstrand
MPEGPlay written and/or improved by Brian Wilougby and William A. Rozzi
Opener 3.1 written by Michael Hawley, copyright MIT Media Laboratory Aug 1993