MMD > Archives > March 1996 > 1996.03.12 > 04Prev  Next


MIME Attachments and E-mail / FTP Gateway
By Steve Vance

>  [ I'm leaving the MIME enclosure attached, below, as some of you can read
>  [ it and I know some of you don't have FTP access.

Gee, here I was bragging about how Pegasus could decode anything, and
then it didn't recognize the "base64" attachment in the same digest.
Maybe there was some MIME header line that it needs in the message
header.  At least if it were uuencoded instead of base64, I could
have used Pegasus's Reader>Special>Uudecode menu item to extract it.
Anyway, I used the Reader>Extract menu item to copy the digest to a
file, and then I ran a program called UUDEVIEW on that file to decode
the base64.  This worked fine to extract the MID file.  UUDEVIEW is
widely available (on BBSes, AOL, etc), I got it from one of the
SIMTEL mirrors (oak.oakland.edu, I think) in the "msdos/decode"
directory.  Any questions?

>  [ There is an "obscure"
>  [ way to have FTP archive files (from anywhere) e-mailed to you by using
>  [ an FTP/e-mail gateway server at DEC.  I'll try to get more information

To get started in how to request files on ftp sites be e-mailed to
you (if you don't have any regular ftp access), send a message to
"ftpmail@gatekeeper.dec.com" containing only the word "help", and
you'll get some instructions back.  To have the file from yesterday's
digest e-mailed to you from Jody's ftp site, you would mail this
message to ftpmail@gatekeeper.dec.com:

     connect foxtail.com
     binary
     uuencode
     chdir /pub/automatic-music/misc
     get 68283b.mid
     quit

 [ Editor's Note:  Thanks Steve, for refreshing my memory on the mail server
 [ at gatekeeper.  This procedure can be used to retrieve any MIDI file from
 [ any site that has MIDI files on an FTP server that accepts anonymous login.
 [
 [ With regard to the "base64" attachment, I probably "broke" the attachment
 [ rules when I edited the mail into the digest.  I think in the future I'm
 [ going to just put the pathname in the digest and let people retrieve the
 [ files via FTP (or the gateway described above) if they are interested in
 [ them.  Either that, or I'll start using UUENCODE exclusively, since most
 [ mailers can find the beginning of the attachment more easily.  I'm getting
 [ a lot of attachments these days in base64 encoding.  I also get a few
 [ in BINHEX format, even from some non-Macintosh users.  I'm unable to deal
 [ with BINHEX on Unix.  Does anyone have any free source code for me ?
 [
 [ Jody

(Message sent Tue, 12 Mar 1996 11:35:19 -0800 , from time zone -0800.)

Key Words in Subject:  Attachments, E-mail, FTP, Gateway, MIME