From: Mark Crispin <mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU>
Subject: MIME-capable software
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Organization: University of Washington
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 04:44:31 GMT

You can find MIME software at the following places:

	thumper.bellcore.com:	pub/nsb/
This system has both the MIME documents (BodyFormats.*) and MetaMail,
which is a software package layered on top of your favorite mail
reader to provide MIME capability.

	ftphost.cac.washington.edu	mail/
This system has the following MIME-capable software:
 EasyMail	- Pre-built binary of a basic MIME NeXTstep mailreader
 MailManager	- Pre-built binary of a more powerful MIME NeXTstep mailreader
 imap.tar.Z	- c-client developer kit including sources for EasyMail and
		  MailManager
 multimedia-demo.mbox
		- MIME torture test mailbox
 pine2.4.tar.Z	- Pine 2.4 source distribution (includes pine, pico and imapd)
 pine-bin.next	- NeXT binary for latest version of Pine
 pico-bin.next	- NeXT binary for latest version of Pico

EasyMail and MailManager haven't been worked on much since 0.8 days,
but they are MIME-capable as a result of my spending about a week to
add the MIME support to them.  They will play the sound and show the
image (assuming you have ImageView installed on your system) of the
infamous 700K comp.sys.next.misc message.  They have limited netnews
reading capability, in one of three ways:
 (1) If you have netnews on your local filesystem you can open
     the mailbox *comp.sys.next.misc and read the message.
 (2) If you have access to an IMAP server with netnews you can
     open the mailbox *comp.sys.next.misc on that host.
 (3) Otherwise, you can copy the message to an mbox format file
     using rn or your favorite tool, then open it as an ordinary
     mailbox.
[Note: unless you have IMAP the `Host' field in Open Mailbox and the
 `Repository' field in Preferences should be blank.]

Pine is a very nice mail and newsreader especially oriented for novice
users.  It is a UNIX application.  Last week, I was shown a version of
Pine which is MIME-capable, but I don't know if its developer
installed it on the distribution directory before going on vacation on
Friday.  If not, it'll be available in a couple of weeks after he gets
back.  The MIME-capable Pine displayed images on an X terminal, and I
think it could also play sounds on a NeXT and SUN.

All of this software is based upon c-client, which is a general,
portable library to support access to mail and news.  The idea behind
c-client is that there is a single common set of routines that
manipulate mailboxes, so the developer of a particular e-mail or news
application can concentrate on the user interface rather than the
mechanics of manipulating mailboxes.  c-client has been ported to a
wide variety of platforms, including DOS and Mac.

Complete sources for *all* of this software, both at BellCore and UW,
is included.  There is no relation between the BellCore and UW
software other than the fact that they've been baked off against each
other and shown to interoperate.

What's more, all of this software is free.  There's no `copyleft' to
restrict what you can do with it.

With all of this handed to you, there should be no excuses for not
having MIME capability widely available on NeXTs.  If you don't like
the user interface of MailManager, you have all the sources and you
can hack at it to your heart's desire.  Or, if you want to write the
ultimate MailAndNewsGrazer, you have in c-client a nice library which
supports the relevant standards and does all your parsing work for
you, so you can concentrate on your NeXTstep coding.

If, with InterfaceBuilder and c-client, it is too hard to write
MIMEware for the NeXT, then maybe NeXT isn't the great development
platform for `mission critical application' that its PR flaks claim.
I've heard you guys rave for years now.  You can talk the talk; can
you walk the walk?

Better hurry.  A guy at SUN recently finished a MIME SUN mailer based
upon c-client.  I don't know if it was for internal use only or is a
new product.

Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc