Reading MIME Messages
[previous]
[next]
[table of contents] [index]
By now you should have also received the sample MIME message
from mh-mime-sample@online.ora.com that you requested at
the end of the Section Sending Mail.
(The Chapter Introduction to MIME
introduces MIME mail.)
If you can't send mail outside your site, or if you'd rather not wait for
the email to come back, you also can get a copy of the sample message from
this book's
online archive.
The file is chapter05/mime-sample;
you can copy it into your inbox by going to a UNIX shell prompt
(shown as % here) and typing the command line below.
Be sure to use backquotes (`), not single quotes ('):
% cp /path-to-/chapter05/mime-sample `mhpath new +inbox`
The Figure below
shows the sample message displayed in exmh.
The Clip menu entry was used to display it in a larger, detached window.
Figure: Displaying a MIME message
The MIME message has three parts to it; these are numbered and
labeled in the display.
The first part is a multipart/alternative content, which means there
are a few different ways to view the content.
This is indicated by the message under the heading 1. that there are
alternative views of the following content.
exmh will display what it thinks is the best alternative; you see the
text/enriched content displayed in part 1.2.
If you want to see the other alternatives, then you can press the right
button over section 1 to get a popup menu with some choices.
The next two parts are an audio clip and a picture in GIF format.
The text for each part tells you a command you could run to view,
or hear, the part.
However, all you need to do is press the right
mouse button over each part in order to get a menu of operations
to perform on the content.
If you press the right button over part 2., then the
popup menu will offer you these choices:
-
Decode part as MIME
-
Save Hello from the author...
-
View using mailcap rule...
-
Pass an audio fragment to metamail...
The first item is a checkbox menu item that lets you view the raw content
if you want to.
The Save... menu entry displays a file selection box so you can choose
a non-temporary file to store the content.
The next two entries should result in the same thing.
They use the mailcap specifications
to run another program that
displays the content.
In the first case, View using mailcap rule...,
exmh runs the program directly.
In the other case,
Pass to metamail..., the metamail program is run first; it
decodes the mailcap file and runs the external program.
|
