View on a fetched attatchment??

[andutt]

How to i look at an attatchment that i have fetched from a POP3 server?? sendmail seems to put it in my mbox but when i look at it with the mailprogram (mail) its just the text and some rubbish text

The attatchment was a jpg image...

I´m using fetchmail to retrive my emails from the POP3-server...
with following syntax:

fetchmail -v -u -p POP3 -u <mailaccount> <mailserver>

Any clues??

[Dolda2000]

I was under the impression that you would be fluent in MIME? Anyway, first, you'll need to isolate the attachment from the multipart message; just copy and paste it to a text file, or use awk or anything. Then (I'm assuming that it's BASE64 encoded) use mimencode -u to decode the attachment.

[andutt]

OK, so i just extract the encoded part of the message that is krypted and use mimeencode on it??

Hehe...you are correct i have worked with linux and unix for a good wile but almost nothing with email-systems like sendmail,postfix etc...thats a little weird i know. I have to read up on that...

Thanx for the tip....

[Dolda2000]

Yep. You see, SMTP is defined to be able to work with 7-bit transmission protocols (since it was first used over modems and X.56-or-whatever-they're-called-again networks and stuff, all of which were not able to handle 8-bit traffic), and therefore BASE64 is used to reduce 8-bit files to 6 bits. It reads 6 bits at a time from the file and then transcribes the 6-bit words using a lookup table, that avoids control characters and stuff that modems are sensitive to.

Note that it's actually spelt mimencode, though, not mimeencode.