Re: Suggestion: Handle Application/PDF just like image attachments

On Wed, 31 May 2006, Matt Ackeret wrote:

> Awesome..  Do you know of a manpage that describes .mailcap?  (man mailcap
> and man .mailcap show nothing, apropos mailcap only shows one Perl call.)

Gee, you really caught me off guard here. I was about to reply "try man 
mailcap", an action that was caught short when the paragraph quoted 
above eventually was parsed by my brain. Then I though, let's send you a 
courtesy copy of my FreeBSD mailcap(5). Hrrrm, guess what -- FreeBSD 
doesn't come with one either.

I always hate it when progress moves backward.

Anyway, I went on a trip down memory lane and visited an old BSD/OS 
machine I set up way back when. Before anyone says it: yes, I'm aware of 
Google, but I misplaced that lovely URL to drive the point home. But 
stuff I know I can get by using man(1) I always prefer to obtain by 
using man(1).

Mailcap is part of Bellcore's metamail package. On FreeBSD, it lives in 
/usr/ports/mail/metamail (and considering that the tarball for 
mm2.7.tar.Z dates back to 1994, I can't blindly recommend installing it: 
please remember that borked mailcaps are a _huge_ vector for e-mail 
borne trojans, which is why I go through the process of saving my 
attachments rather than trying to automate viewing, and code untouched 
since 1994 either is perfect or unmaintained, and a brief look in the 
FreeBSD patches for metamail sort of disproves the first hypothesis).

> I added:
> Image/GIF; open -a Preview %s
>
> and that seems to work fine (I simply parrotted the one existing other line
> there).  I should just try it, but maybe there are more things I can put
> in the mailcap file -- e.g. Image/* might work.. Reading a description of
> the proper format would be great.

Image/* probably will work. It will probably also expose your e-mail 
client to whatever bugs may lurk in MacOS X's "Preview".

It's 11PM, do you know what your Windows MetaFile (.wmf) parser is 
doing?

Were you aware you may have a wmf parser in Preview? Much as I hate 
Windows, the drive to make an OS do everything on behalf of the user 
in the name of user friendliness without letting the user know how 
unusual the request may be is not just Windows's hallmark.

I've sent the man page under seperate cover. On a side note, seeing that 
Pine refers to the metamail manpage without mentioning it by name, 
including a mailcap manpage with Pine would probably be a good idea.

Cheers,

 				-- Bert
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