Re: UUEncoding File Attachment

[Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hector Santos <hsantos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I know this is an old method for file attachments, but I would be
> interesting to know the extent of existing systems have decided to pull
> support for uuencoded file attachment at the inbound side.

> I ask because I came around at least one system, GMAIL.COM, who does not
> support uuencoded file attachments in their WEB interface.

Do you really mean a uuencoded file *attachment*, in the MIME sense, or do
you mean the historic uuencode behavior of just dumping the uuencode
output into the undelimited body of the message?  I ask because I've never
seen the former, but that's what "attachment" means in the world of
e-mail.

If you mean the latter, there's a fundamental problem here that MIME
solves, namely that it's impossible to know for certain that you're
dealing with a uuencoded file.  You can make a guess based on a line
starting with "begin " followed by some lines that look encoded, but it's
a pretty ugly heuristic and isn't reliable engineering.

uuencode is still moderately common on Usenet.  I've not seen a uuencoded
file in e-mail for years.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>