From: Daniel Stenberg (daniel@haxx.se)
Date: Tue Jan 22 2002 - 08:40:06 CST
On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, De wrote:
> I have received an email with attachment that needs octet-stream. Where
> it's possible to find and download it.
If we ever get a FAQ written for Hypermail, this is the only question we need
to add.
No attachment "needs" octet-stream. octet-stream is a label that describes
the attachment as being "a stream of octets". What is that you say? Well, the
application didn't know any more specifics and thus it identified it as good
as possible. It knows it is a stream of octets, nothing else.
So, an attachment coming as "octet-stream" can be pretty much ANYTHING. You
have no idea, and neither does anyone else. The only way to figure out is to
download the file and see for yourself, ask the person who mailed it or to
hope that the mail it came with describes what the attachment was about.
"octet-stream" could just as well be named "I haven't got the slightest idea
what this is, but I know it is built up with a series of bytes".
I'm not being long-widing at you personally, but now when I've replied a long
answer, I'll start posting a link to this mail when people ask about this in
the future! ;-O
--
Daniel Stenberg - http://daniel.haxx.se - +46-705-44 31 77
ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol