Re: Sending attachments

[Chad Brown]

On Jul 4, 2009, at 8:53 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > From: Chad Brown <address@hidden>
> > Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:33:56 -0700
> >
> > I doubt that you can make mail-mode usable for the mime- handling
> > features that multiple packages want from message-mode without
> > significant (mostly duplicated) effort.
>
> Could you please post a list of the features you had in mind, so that
> the effort could be estimated?
>
> Just looking at email messages with MIME attachments, it looks like
> each attachment is just a fancy header line and a body encoded by
> either base64 or quoted-printable.  Implementing a simple command that
> asks for a file name and then encodes it and puts the result in the
> *mail* buffer sounds easy enough, so I'm sure I'm missing something.

I'm sorry to say that it's unlikely, but I will see if I can do.  Most  
of my experience with this sort of thing comes from long-ago work on  
MH-e, wherein I found that simple MIME is pretty easy but everything  
turns crazy when you hit multipart/mixed and multipart/alternative.   
If the goal is simply to be able to attach files to messages, then the  
code required is very simple (my long-ago MH-e for doing so was less  
than 15 lines of elisp).  If you want to handle the larger range of  
MIME options, the complication is hard to avoid.

To be more specific about what I was trying to say:   I doubt that  
mail-mode can be made into a replacement for message-mode for things  
like MH-e easily, and I expect the result will duplicate most of  
message mode.  Adding a simple `attach file' to mail-mode is probably  
not very hard at all, but the result won't allow you to drop message- 
mode/mml (it's been long enough that I forget which parts are where).

*chad