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Pine uses MIME's Base64 encoding for all attachments, including text, in order to assure that they are not modified in transit. The goal is make sure that sending file attachments in Pine is as dependable as using FTP.
Although it may seem like encoding is unnecessary for files that are plain text, certain email gateway, trasport, and delivery agents pose a threat to the integrity of even text files (much less binary files). For example, long lines may be wrapped, trailing spaces deleted, tabs turned into spaces, lines beginning with "From" modified, etc.
This is easily done by using Pine's "file inclusion" key (^R). Instead of entering the file name on the Attchmnt: header line, move the cursor to the bottom of your message, and press "^R Read File", then enter the name of the text file. It will be included at the end of your message without any encoding (unless the file contains 8 bit or binary characters, in which case the entire message becomes subject to MIME encoding rules.)
Pine uses the Internet MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard for all attachments. MIME uses "Base64" encoding rather than uuencode, because uuencode uses characters that are transformed by some email gateways, and there are also several incompatible versions of uuencode. However, if needed, you can certainly uuencode a file outside of Pine, then use the Composer's "file inclusion" (^R) command to insert the uuencoded file into the message.
Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> has written a Perl conversion script to convert Mailtool to MIME. The Perl script and C conversion are available in
ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.perl.Z
ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.c.Z
and a description of the program can be found in
ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/MIME/sun-to-mime.README
Save the attachment to a file and use a decoding program running on the operating system you are using and capable of handling the encoding format; for example:
Please note: Successfully decoding an attachment alone does not assure that you can use the resulting file(s) on your computer. For example, you may be able to decode a BinHex-encoded file on your MS Windows/DOS PC, but end up with a Macintosh application that you cannot run; or you may not have the application program needed to open a data file. Ask the sender of the message with the attachment what it is/how do handle it, if in doubt.
Pine uses the MIME Internet standard for
attaching files to email messages. Any MIME-capable mailer should be able to
"understand" Pine's attachments. If the recipient of your message with
attachment does not have MIME-capable email software, they should be able to
save the attachment to a file and then decode that. One freely-available
program which can decipher a MIME attachment is munpack from Carnegie
Mellon. It is available at:
ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack
Another one is UUDeview, available at:
http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/UUDeview/
In Pine, message attachments can be deleted without removing the entire message. This is accomplished by marking the undesired attachment for deletion and saving the message to a folder. Attachments marked for deletion are excluded from the message when it is saved. In addition, the delete mark only applies for the current Pine Session, and is of course gone when the message is saved, and the attachment excluded.
The associated attachments of a message are viewed by pressing ">" or V, opening the ATTACHMENT INDEX. The undesired attachments can be marked for deletion by pressing D. To exit out of the ATTACHMENT INDEX press "<". To actually remove the attachment the message must be saved. Pressing S in the MESSAGE INDEX will display the following warning message:
Saved copy will NOT include entire message! Continue? Y [Yes] N No
If you are sure you want to save the message and exclude the marked attachments, press Y for yes.
So-called "attached-to-ansi" printing relies on the communication software you are using to interpret certain special character sequences that tell it to divert the incoming stream of characters to your printer, and then back to your screen. Perhaps 99% of "pine printing problems" are either due to PC or Mac communications software that doesn't understand ANSI escape sequences for printing, or (in the dialin case) software flow-control problems.
We didn't understand how big a problem software flow control was until 3.90 came out... we changed pine to intercept flow control characters so that users would not see Pine "wedge" mysteriously if a mis-type or noise generated a Control-S, but that did bad things when printers, modems, or comm software was depending on s/w flow control.
In 3.91 we added the preserve-start-stop-characters feature, so that Pine could be configured to respect s/w flow control characters (if the operating system did) for those folks who needed them. Enabling this feature should make Pine 3.91 behave the same way as earlier versions.
Then we discovered that some operating systems don't enable software flow control by default. So starting in 3.92, the preserve-start-stop-characters feature does more than "not ignoring" them, it will try to force the OS to pay attention to them.
So here's the sequence of things to try if you have pine printing problems:
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