[TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
Jason, that is amazing. Can you e-mail me steps you took? But please
do so off of list.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 1:28 AM,  <jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
> As much as I despise the whole ‘email server is my file server’, the thing
> is that email clients are cross platform, and an easy way to get data in and
> out of a server, and out to other people.  SMTP+UUENCODE/MIME is basically
> the best peer to peer network that is still going strong, since RFC 821 in
> 1982!  Naturally other email systems existed prior to this, but SMTP let you
> easily send across the internet, in a method that basically still works to
> this day, although servers have become more selective on who they talk to,
> thanks to the rise of SPAM..
>
>
>
> I just fired up 4.3 BSD Uwsic, and setup an external DNS, and right away I’m
> able to send an email, and I’m able to receive it on gmail:
>
>
>
> From: The Not Ready for Prime Time Super User root at csl3.wisc.edu
>
>
>
> Compared to what a disaster FTP turned out with it’s active/passive port
> games, SMTP with it’s relay based nature is still the easiest way to send &
> receive data.  Add in something like Microsoft Exhcange, which has
> persistent and shared data stores, it’s quite easily to setup ‘public
> folders’ and keep binaries in there.  Of course you’d be crazy to put
> ancient email servers directly onto the internet, but you can easily setup
> forwarding/spooling gateways like postfix, to process inbound mail, and
> deliver it to your ancient UNIX/VMS/MacOS/Windows server of choice.  I route
> mine through MS Office 365, but backend on Exchange 5.5 as I can use the
> Outlook client on MS-DOS, MacOS, and OS/2 to easily get files around if
> needed.  Add in stunnel, and you can even use ‘modern’ IMAP clients against
> Exchange 5.5... Not that I’d recommend you doing something like this... lol
>
>
>
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
>
>
>
> From: Dan Cross
> Sent: Sunday, 12 March 2017 9:16 AM
> To: Mary Ann Horton
> Cc: TUHS main list
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 6:05 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:
>
> Possible?  Yes.  Convenient?  No.
>
> You could cat several uuencode files together and send them in one email.
> You'd have to edit them on the receiving end into separate files and
> uudecode them separately.  In practice, you'd uuencode a tarball.
>
> MIME was a major advance, and what's telling is that 25 years later,
> SMTP/MIME is still the standard.
>
>
>
> This is so interesting. Not to be argumentative about it but I felt it was
> actually something of a regression. Something like making a file available
> via an FTP server (possible in an executable but unreadable directory with
> an obscure name) or just in some directory in an organization where a
> filesystem was shared and sending a pointer to the file via email seemed
> much more efficient, particularly if one was sending to multiple recipients.
> Attaching files to email as MIME components felt like trying to turn email
> into a filesystem, and SMTP into a file transfer protocol. The way I saw it,
> email was email and we already had file transfer protocols....
>
>
>
> It seemed like MIME really took off when Microsoft embraced it; before that,
> plain ol' text seemed much more common. My sense at the time was that
> networked filesystems and services like FTP (or the then-nascent HTTP) were
> far less commonplace on the MS platform, so email as a content distribution
> mechanism was more natural in that world. I was somewhat dismayed at the
> inability to make Windows users see the light; in retrospect, of course,
> this just means that I myself was missing something critical.
>
>
>
> Mary Ann, why did you consider it such a step forward? I'm really curious
> about the reasoning from folks involved with such things at the time.
>
>
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
>
>