From: CRDGW2::CRDGW2::MRGATE::"SMTP::ANDREW.CMU.EDU::ATKBB+BAD-ADDRESSES" Date: 3-MAR-1992 06:56:48 Description: Re: Messages dosen't work From: atkbb+Bad-Addresses@andrew.cmu.edu@SMTP@CRDGW2 To: sweng@arisia@MRGATE Received: by crdgw1.ge.com (5.57/GE 1.123) id AA05358; Tue, 3 Mar 92 06:09:54 EST Received: by po2.andrew.cmu.edu (5.54/3.15) id ; Mon, 2 Mar 92 11:02:12 EST Received: via switchmail for info-andrew+@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr0/ak99/dists/info-andrew-strip.dl); Mon, 2 Mar 1992 11:02:08 -0500 (EST) Received: from andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Mon, 2 Mar 1992 10:57:54 -0500 (EST) Received: from po3.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Mon, 2 Mar 1992 10:56:56 -0500 (EST) Received: from thumper.bellcore.com by po3.andrew.cmu.edu (5.54/3.15) id for info-andrew; Mon, 2 Mar 92 10:56:42 EST Received: from greenbush.bellcore.com by thumper.bellcore.com (4.1/4.7) id for info-andrew@andrew.cmu.edu; Mon, 2 Mar 92 10:56:40 EST Received: by greenbush.bellcore.com (4.1/4.7) id for info-andrew@andrew.cmu.edu; Mon, 2 Mar 92 10:56:39 EST Received: from Messages.8.5.N.CUILIB.3.45.SNAP.NOT.LINKED.greenbush.galaxy.sun4.41 via MS.5.6.greenbush.galaxy.sun4_41; Mon, 2 Mar 1992 10:56:31 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <4dgZ0jG0M2YtAJjxIk@thumper.bellcore.com> Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1992 10:56:31 -0500 (EST) From: Nathaniel Borenstein To: Juergen Henke Subject: Re: Messages dosen't work Cc: info-andrew@andrew.cmu.edu In-Reply-To: References: <9202290105.AA11743@madrone.eecs.ucdavis.edu> What you're seeing is the effect of receiving mail in MIME format (the new proposed internet standard format for multimedia mail). Messages 7.15 tries to display such mail using the metamail program, which is available freely from Bellcore. If metamail is not installed at your site, you get the behavior you describe. For information on metamail, I append my first public announcement of metamail to the net world. If you pick up metamail, be sure to join the info-metamail mailing list, so that you hear about the second and much enhanced release of metamail, coming VERY soon... By the way, the next Andrew release -- the famed CD ROM release -- will include version 8.5 (or later) of Messages, which has integrated support for both reading and sending mail in MIME format. It actually uses metamail less than 7.15, because it understands how to handle a lot of the MIME types in an integrated fashion. But even with 8.5, you'll still need metamail to display the MIME types that Andrew doesn't understand, of which there will always be some because the set of MIME types is so extensible. Metamail will also itself be included as part of the next Andrew distribution, thus making things a tad less complicated for Andrew users. But users of Messages 7.15 might want to pick up metamail in advance of that upgrade. -- Nathaniel ---------------------------------------------------------------- On behalf of Bellcore, I am happy to announce the availability of the "metamail" software to the email community. This package, which is available free of charge for unlimited use by anyone for any purpose, is offered in the hope of making multimedia mail more widespread. OVERVIEW The basic idea of "multimedia" electronic mail is to extend email as we now know it to include many other types of data beyond plain English text. In particular, there is no reason, in principle, why email should not include text in any of the world's languages and character sets, nor why email should not include pictures, sounds, animations, active spreadsheets, or any other kind of data that can be stored on a computer. In recent years, various research systems and even some commercial products have extended email to include some or all of these capabilities. Until recently, however, none of them worked together, and all of them required whole communities of users to abandon their old tools en masse in favor of the new tools of a single software vendor. Recent developments have the promise of changing all of that. There is a new proposed standard for the format of multimedia mail, which would make software from different vendors able to work together smoothly with multimedia mail, as they do now with plain text mail. The software being announced here implements that proposed standard, but takes it a step further by incorporating it into the existing tools with which people read mail today, allowing multimedia mail to be adopted in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary fashion. DETAILS Metamail is a package that can be used to convert virtually ANY mail-reading program on UNIX into a multimedia mail-reading program. It is an extermely generic implementation of MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), the proposed standard for multimedia mail formats on the Internet. The implementation is extremely flexible and extensible, using a "mailcap" file mechanism for adding support for new data formats when sent through the mail. At a heterogeneous site where many mail readers are in use, the mailcap mechanism can be used to extend them all to support new types of multimedia mail by a single addition to a mailcap file. The core of the package is a mechanism that allows the easy configuration of mail readers to call external "viewers" for different types of mail. However, beyond this core mechanism, the distribution includes viewers for a number of mail types defined by the MIME standard, so that it is useful immediately and without any special site-specific customization or extension. Types with built-in support in the metamail distribution include: 1. Plain US ASCII (i.e., English) text, of course. 2. Plain text in the ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew/English) character set. 3. Richtext (multifont formatted text, termcap-oriented viewer) 4. Image formats (using the xloadimage program under X11) 5. Audio (initial "viewer" for SPARCstations) 6. Multipart mail, combining several other types 7. Multipart/alternative mail, offering data in multiple formats. 8. Encapsulated messages 9. Partial & external messages (for large data objects) 10. Arbitrary (untyped) binary data Other media types and character sets may be easily supported with the mailcap mechanism, using the provided types as examples/templates. The metamail software also provides rudimentary support for the use of non-ASCII characters in certain mail headers, as described by a companion document to the proposed MIME standard. The metamail distribution comes complete with a small patch for each of over a dozen popular mail reading programs, including Berkeley mail, mh, Elm, Xmh, Xmail, Mailtool, Emacs Rmail, Emacs VM, Andrew, and others. Crafting a patch for additional mail readers is relatively straightforward. In order to build the metamail software, a single "make" command followed by a relatively short compilation will suffice. Patching your mail reader is somewhat harder, but can usually be accomplished in less than an hour if you have the sources at hand. The experience of beta testers is that the metamail package can easily be used to get multimedia mail working with your existing mail readers in less than half a day. AVAILABILITY To retrieve the file, use anonymous ftp to the machine thumper.bellcore.com (Internet address 128.96.41.1). Type "cd pub/nsb". In that directory, you will find: 1. mm.tar.Z -- this is a compressed tar file containing the entire metamail distribution. Uncompress it, untar it, and read the top-level "README" file for further instructions. Strictly speaking, this is the only thing you really need to retrieve. 2. A subdirectory called "samples". Except for the README file, each file in this directory is a sample MIME-format message, which can be used to test your metamail installation. There is also now a compressed tar file of this directory, called "samples.tar.Z". 3. BodyFormats.{ps,txt,ex} -- a copy (in PostScript/text/Andrew format) of the latest draft of the MIME proposed standard. This document is also available as an Internet Draft. 4. Configuration.{ps,txt,ex} -- a copy (in PostScript/text/Andrew format) of the latest draft of the Internet informational RFC describing the mailcap file format. This document is also available as an Internet Draft. A new mailing list has been set up for disucssion of the metamail software and related issues. The mailing list is INFO-METAMAIL@thumper.bellcore.com. Requests to join the list should be directed to INFO-METAMAIL-REQUEST@thumper.bellcore.com. Please feel free to recirculate this announcement as widely as possible. -- Nathaniel S. Borenstein Member of Technical Staff, Bellcore