Athena Support for MIME in Mail User Agents

This document describes the Athena-supplied configuration files and tools you can use to read and compose MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions) documents in electronic mail. A mail user agent (or MUA) is the program you use to read and send electronic mail.

MIME is a standard set of rules for formatting electronic-mail messages to "enclose" other objects such as images and documents, or even other messages. A MIME-aware MUA interprets such messages, breaking out the sections and presenting enclosures through the appropriate viewing software. For example, it would display an enclosed PostScript file with the GhostScript viewer instead of showing you the raw PostScript commands.

For more information on MIME, see the comp.mail.mime FAQ: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/text/faq/usenet/mail/mime-faq/part1/faq.html,
and this overview of the MIME standard, http://www.mindspring.com/~mgrand/mime.html.

Using MIME Support in Your Environment

First, please see Electronic Mail on Athena (AC-31), if you have not read it already. It describes the Athena-supported MH, xmh, and mh-e mail handlers.

By default, your Athena environment disables MIME support in the MH family of mail handlers, because there was no good default configuration in the released software.

With the configurations and tools in the mime locker, you can enable MIME support again, following theses steps:

  1. Add the mime locker as part of your default environment, e.g. by inserting "add mime" in your ~/.environment file.
    See Customizing Your Athena Session ("Dotfiles") (AC-16) for more details about this.
  2. If your shell is csh or tcsh (the default), add this line to your ~/.environment file:
    source /mit/mime/share/setup.csh
  3. If you use the Bourne shell (/bin/sh) or a derivative like bash, add this line to your ~/.profile:
    . /mit/mime/share/setup.sh

The next time you login, your environment will be set up to use MIME.

What does MIME support do?

When you receive a MIME message with some content (a section of the message made up of a different type of data), the mail reader will display it with the appropriate application program. For example, FrameMaker and MS Word documents are displayed in a word-processor, images with xv, etc.

Sometimes your mailer will give up trying to display a piece of content because its content-type is improperly described or unknown. If this happens, you can save the piece of content as a file. Use the command
mhn -store -part part-number  message-number. You can list the parts of a multipart message with
mhn -list message-number.

Types of content supported by Athena MIME

Mail User Agents that support MIME

The following MUAs include some MIME support that is configured by the tools in this locker.

Mail User Agents that DO NOT support MIME

Last revised: $Id: index.html,v 1.4 1998/04/02 03:25:14 lcs Exp $
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