Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I have mutt working in BL3 and BL2 now.  The manual says you need 
mime.types in one of three locations.  I notice it is in ~/Mail which is 
not on the list. I mention this because when I try to send a binary 
attachment things sometimes go wrong.

Text is properly detected and sent as 7-bit ascii.
gif jpg pdf get sent as base64

But wav and ppm files were detected and attached as quoted iso-8859-2 
which is the E. European charset.  This encoding encodes only the 
upper ASCII characters specially and thus takes up less space than 
plain base64 (which I think encodes all chars as 8-bit).  So I poked 
around in /root/Mail and found some pertinent files.

I found charset set to iso-8859-2 in /root/Mail/.lang.
I don't recall instructions to change this in README.  Might it be safer 
to set it to 8859-1 as default for the lucky majority of BL users who 
don't need to modify programs to use their charset and are not expecting 
to need to change it?

If I change to iso-8859-1 my .wav file is attached as 'quoted ISO-8859-1' 
instead of -2.  It still won't come out as music, will it?  What do I need 
to do to make mutt encode .wav and .ppm files as base64 in attachments?

I notice that .mailcap has something about gz and jpeg and gif and png but 
not wav or ppm.  Mutt correctly encoded tgz jpg gif but not wav or 
ppm.  Do you want to add these to the default .mailcap?  What other 
formats do people use that are not in .mailcap already?    I will attempt 
to add .wav and .ppm myself so that I can attach these as base64 without 
needing to modify mutt's expert guesses.

In .muttrc you have editor set to e3pi for BL2.  I happen to have e3 on my 
computer but pico might be safer for the BL2 package.

In both BL2 and BL3 .mailcap you have zgv as default image viewer and xv 
as an alternate.  BL3 does not have either of these but it does have xli. 
Could you puy xli and seejpeg instead in the BL3 .mailcap?  Seejpeg is in 
SW3.5.  I suppose xli should be the default since it comes with BL3 tho it 
is not cli.

I see you have catdoc set up to view .doc files and links-0.90 for .html 
files.  I will have to remember to change that if I install links2 and 
delete links-0.90 (along with the line in alias for links).  Would it work 
to specify just 'links' since there is an alias for that already?

It is nice to see that catdoc will also read rtf and xls files.  I thought 
you needed a separate program for each of those.  This mail package is 
really a winner!

Why do you have two ways specified for reading html?  Should one of them 
have an # in front of it so as not to confuse mutt, or does it just choose 
the first?


My apologies if I somehow confused the two mail programs for BL2 and BL3 - 
I have mounted the BL3 partition to refer to it from BL2.

Many thanks for exactly the linux mail program I had been hunting for but 
thought never existed (simple text program that will attach binary files) 
and it also does much more than I ever expected, and it is fast and simple 
to use.

I have not tried Sylpheed as I prefer CLI if available.  Has that worked 
well for other users?

We are apparently not a gaming crowd.  I will try to test out these games 
some day but I really don't understand how to set up a network other than 
to just send/receive files and at least one is network based.  It will be 
educational.

Has sqlite worked for other users?  That is also going to be a winter 
project for me, before tax time.  Mutt was more of a priority.


keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org