[KLUG Members] MIME attachments

Bruce Smith bruce at armintl.com
Wed Nov 16 15:00:20 EST 2005 

If you want to send email attachments from a shell script and don't want
to learn MIME, "uuenview" is a nice command which works nicely.  It's
part of the uudeview package in SuSE.

 - BS


> Fellow KLUGites and developers, 
> I want to generate some email that will have one or more attachments, so I want to 
> understand MIME very clearly. So far, here's what I do....
> 
> I add these lines to the header:
> 
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="-d-i-v-i-d-i-n-g--l-i-n-e"
> 
> And the body of the message looks like...
> --------------------------------------------
> You will only see this if you're using a non-MIME supporting Client!!
> 
> -d-i-v-i-d-i-n-g--l-i-n-e
> Content-Type: text/html;
> 
> <html>
>   <head>
>   ....
> </html>
> 
> -d-i-v-i-d-i-n-g--l-i-n-e
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> More attachments work pretty much the same way. I have derived the above by
> inspecting a number of MIMEd mail messages as plain text files, and I'm omitting
> some detail
> 
> Seems simple enough for EVERYONE'S favorite, HTML Mail! :)
> 
> It is a simple example, and the main app generates HTML-based reports
> (PDF, when I get done with it).
> 
> 
> Anyway, I send the message, and it all looks well on recipt... UNTIL
> I try to read the attachment! This is why the above example is not more 
> complex; if It doesn't work, then I have missed something that would 
> probably be true for a more complex example, but something more complex
> would introduce other factors.... maybe...
> 
> In any case, I get an amusing set of errors, the wording varies with the mail
> application I happen to be using....
> 
> Outlook 97:
>   
> An error prevented processing the message to completion. The original
> message is contained in the attached file MESSAGE.TXT
> 
> 	Which does NOT display as HTML.
> 
> mhstore: bogus multipart content in message xxxx
> 
> Really helpful...
> 
> I could try more clients, but I suspect I will only increase my collection
> of somewhat useless but mildly amusing error messages.
> 
> I don't want to build something based on a pile of libraries, as I'm trying
> to keep this thing reasonably portable and compact. I am thinking that we 
> can build MIME'd  messages for special cases rather easily....
> 
> I've also looked for more detailed information about all this, but found very
> little. Perhaps it is swamped by all the references to various MIME-capable
> applications...
> 
> I lok forward to your replies...
> 							Regards,
> 							---> RGB <---

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