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On Saturday, July 18 at 02:41 PM, quoth lee:
>> Hmm, well, I guess I see your point, but not even mutt supports
>> batch-decoding like that. Do you perhaps have a perl script of some
>> kind that you use to bulk-decode like that?
>
> Unfortunately not; but I haven't needed one yet. Saving whole
> containers is merely a possibility that comes to mind when considering
> attachments as containers that contain something. That's something I
> didn't do before. Once you do, it's evident that a MUA could have a
> way to save a whole container like that.
>
> Perhaps we should make a feature request?
Well, I was thinking that it might be possible using tags and piping
with a slick perl script, that you could glue together with a macro..
> Speaking of which, I sometimes wished that I could just attach a
> whole folder instead of having to attach all the files separately.
You *can* do the tag-and-attach approach. Saves time over attaching
each file independently.
> Since pictures can be large, the user should be able to specify a
> size limit after attaching a folder (or large files) to a message,
> and the MUA should automatically split the thing up as needed.
>
> These mime guys did only part of the job --- or maybe it's the MUA
> developers.
It's the MUA developers. MIME supports a "message/partial" entity type
(section 7.3.2 of RFC 1521), which allows a "message" (i.e. a MIME
structure) to be split up across multiple emails. Outlook Express
supports it, but it's the only MUA I know of that does. The origin of
the idea was to avoid problems with slow unreliable modems that
periodically disconnected, so that if you've only partially uploaded
your giant email to someone, at least part of it will have been sent
(and received)... it just can't be decoded & viewed until you've sent
all the pieces of it. It could also be used to circumvent limits on
single message sizes.
> So where's the full MUA support of the mime stuff?
Good question.
For what it's worth, another way to segment large files (or
collections of files) is to use the shell utility `split` (and the
recipient can use `cat` to put them all together again). Combine that
with `tar`, and you can pretty efficiently chunk up large collections
of files. Then, again using your shell (assuming all the segments are
in a folder called "segments"), you can send those segments using
mutt, like this:
for F in segments/* ; do
mutt -s "segment $F" -a $F -- recipi...@example.com
done
Not exactly *convenient*, though... but unless your recipient is using
Outlook Express, there's not much point in using a MIME trick that
they can't take advantage of.
> The content doesn't matter. No message without headers, but headers
> are content.
A fair point. Kind of like saying "no file without an inode".
>> So... it sounds like, because it's English, words got re-used and
>> redefined into confusion.
>
> Hm. I was about to say that it doesn't have to be that way, but, since
> I'm German, I find that English, at least American English, is mott
> very sloppy and indistinctive with things. There are distinctions I
> "naturally" make in German that nobody makes in English. That means
> they are not aware that there is the possibility of making a
> distinction. English doesn't allow them to think of one, it sets
> limits. I can't tell if that's really true because I might not feel
> that way if English was my native language --- and it's impossible to
> tell because if English was my native language, I wouldn't be aware of
> the possibility (unless I learned another language, maybe).
English has its trade-offs, like most things. While it is a bit sloppy
and leaves a lot up to interpretation, that leads to lots of fun
double- or triple-entendres (which has benefits in the realms of
poetry, humor, and other forms of literature), and lets us use nouns
as verbs, among other things. By not requiring the speaker to make
distinctions about everything, it leaves a lot more room for
interpretation, which is both liberating and frustrating for the exact
same reason.
~Kyle
- --
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the
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