Re[2]: Will the real uuencode please stand up?

[RCB@xxxxxx (Chris Bartram)]

 In <> Rick Troth <TROTH@ua1vm.ua.edu> writes:

> >I don't understand why uuencode is even being considered as a
> >Content-Transfer-Encoding by anyone. A uuencoded file has more
> >information attached to it than just the encoded contents;   ...
>
>         Bravo, Tony!   Thank you.
>
>         This is what struck me immediately.   It what you're looking for
> is compatibility with "old" (here defined as pre-MIME) mail user agents,
> then it doesn't matter (to the non-MIME MUAs) whether it's CT or CTE.
> New (here defined as MIME) MUAs can have uuencode "hooked in" in mailcap
> or some other mapping function associating CTs with applications.

uuencode only give the file a filename - usually unix-centric; a receiver
still has to guess at the real filetype. At least using it as a CTE lets
you accurately pass the descriptive info to the receiver (for MIME UAs),
while non-MIME UAs can still take their best shot - which they're doing
nowadays anyway.

>         Treating UUENCODE as a CT gives it the (perhaps silly) advantage
> of surviving transport.   After all,  UUENCODE was rejected because it
> doesn't survive some transport.   But a UUENCODE package wrapped-up in
> CTE Base64 would get through just fine.

Wrapping it in BASE64 defeats the purpose of having the same message be
"readable" by both MIME and non-MIME UAs. Certainly, uuencode won't survive
some gateways - it never has - but it's still the ONLY choice for getting
non-ascii data to many mail systems.

As more of the other gateways and mail systems out there adopt MIME, we'll
see less and less need for uuencode; in fact we're seeing alot less since
Lotus and some other big PC packages added MIME support to their gateways.
Before that, our customers with cc:Mail weren't going to purchase a mail
system that wouldn't exchange binary files with cc:Mail. It was support
uuencode - or no sale.

                      Chris Bartram

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