mailx mime types

[Thomas Broccoletti]

Hi

Sending outbound email using mailx with attachments work on some email clients but not others. It seems like mailx does not set the content-type correctly and thus causing the attachment to appear in the body of the email as garbage. I installed PHNE_34304 that fixed some problems with mailx, however, it doesn't help the outbound mail attachments.

[Steven Schweda]

Does anyone other than you and the psychics
know exactly what you're doing with mailx, or
exactly what is getting sent out as e-mail
when you do it?

The last time I used "mailx" (long ago), if
it knew what MIME was, I was blissfully
unaware of it. While I don't do this stuff,
so I know nothing, if I were to try, I would
start by using a program like "mpack" to
create a MIME-compliant message file (which
I could examine at my leisure), and then
using a program like "mailx" (in its
stupidest mode -- "-m"?) to send the result.

Knowing nothing, I can't be confident, but
I'd imagine that feeding MIME into a program
which might add its own "Mime Version,
Content Type & Content Encoding to the header
information while sending mails" could cause
it to spew some mess which might confuse the
recipient. ("man mailx".)

A Forum search here for keywords like, say,
e-mail attachment
should find many old threads on this subject.
Many folks seem to recommend using
"uuencode", but, as I said, I'd try "mpack"
(or something similar) to form a
MIME-compliant message file.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

Try adding these two lines into your /usr/share/lib/mailx.rc file.

set charset=us-ascii
set mimeheader=no

and then send the email attachment. I hope you are using "uuencode" or something similar.

Hope this helps.

Regds
Sanjay

[Dennis Handly]

>It seems like mailx does not set the content-type correctly

mailx(1) knows nothing about attachments and basically sets the mime type to something simple like:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

[Rita C Workman]

Hi Thomas,

mailx is actually an "interactive message processing system" per the manpages.

As such it doesn't have the power or flexibility to do all the MIME things.

You can use a software utility like mpack or you can use the HPUX MIME tools like sendmail or elm. Personally I use elm all the time and for attaching documents, although there are wonderfully a plethora of different utilities other prefer, my favorite is using a seperate file that uses the [include statements]. I like the include statement because I can send attachments be they plain text or MS Excel docs or images (jpeg,tiffs, etc) and I can also change things from being a base64 to quoted-printable,etc.
There have a number of MIME threads covering various ways to do this, so may I suggest you simply do a Search for MIME mail attachments and enjoy.

Kindest regards,
Rita

[Dennis Handly]

>Rita: an "interactive message processing system" per the manpages.

That's a slight overstatement. It forgot to mention that it was from circa 25 years ago. :-)
I'll admit I still use it and use thunderbird if I have to deal with attachments.