From: Daniel Stenberg (Daniel.Stenberg@frontec.se)
Date: Thu Sep 02 1999 - 01:36:00 CDT
On Wed, 1 Sep 1999 jose.kahan@w3.org wrote:
> One of the problems with the MIME attachments is how to make the web
> server send back their content type.
>
> One solution could be to add a file extension, but that extension is
> server dependent.
One problem with trusting the mail content is that instead of getting a
"server dependent" type, we get a client dependent type. I have more than
once seen people mailing attachments with the wrong content-type. But I
guess we have to live with some kind of limitation.
> Another solution is to use meta-data to store the Content-Type header
> associated with each MIME attachment.
I like the idea.
> I implemented this version on my working version of hypermail and am
> succesfully using it against Apache (which supports metadata files). I'm
> unaware if other web servers, besides Apache and CERN (obsolete) support
> metadata.
Using the attachmentlink feature, you could easily write a CGI script that
uses the meta data and the saved file, if the web server doesn't support it.
It could work similar to this:
#!/bin/sh
echo "$meta_content_type";
echo ""
cat $the_attached_file
-- Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast/ You'll find my hypermail pages at http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast/hypermail