Re: Suggestions on how to "upstream" mailcap?

Dominique Dumont <[email protected]> writes:

> On the other hand , mailcap man page mentions that it should be used
> with metamail. This program is not found on Debian. I fear that most
> people are using IMAP to read mail and I wonder if mailcap can fit
> there...

I think the question is are there any clients that use the external
run-mailcap program to look up an entry and dispatch the content, or does
everyone parse the data directly now.  metamail was an even more sweeping
implementation of the idea that programs could delegate their MIME
implementation to an external suite of commands, and I think every
surviving mail reader has stopped using it at this point.

sources.debian.net turns up a few uses of run-mailcap (xdg-utils, mc, Qt),
which implies to me that this is still useful.  (But the mention of
metamail could probably be removed or moved to a historical section.)
Ironically given the history, I think all of the uses of run-mailcap I saw
may be for either web-related uses or for handling arbitrary files, rather
than for the original context of mail or netnews clients.