Shell Programming and Scripting

This is a follow-up re: this thread

As I mentioned, this script works very nicely, thanks again.

However, the ASCII data of the 'attached file' also shows below the body of the email message. Do you know of a way to 'disable' the attached text from showing? Although the file is attached, it seems to confuse some folks to whom I have sent data.

TIA
-jp

Do you know which OS and email software these people are using? I'm not sure that I exactly understand the complaint here. When I use the script to send myself an email message to my Outlook account, yes the attachments are below the body. If Outlook didn't put it somewhere, I'm sure how I would deal with it...

Are you saying that that mailer is opening the attachment and displaying it?

Well whatever the problem is here, I do have something that you can try. When I wrote that script I send myself emails from various mail programs to see what they did. I saw two techniques in use. I went with the simpler one because I saw that it worked. To try the more complex technique, after the line that says:

Code:

print -  'Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; name='${ATTACHMENT}
add this line...
print -  'Content-Disposition: attachment;   filename='${ATTACHMENT}

Let me know if this works better for you. I'm in the midst of writing a successor to mimetool and I'll add that line to it if it helps with some software.

I think the confusion is the customer gets the email, and in the 'preview pane', sees the email body, a separator, then the actual ASCII data that's attached. Right then, the customer is probably thinking there is a problem - without actually checking to see if a file is attached (via the 'paper-clip', or whatever icon their mail client uses to indicate an attachment).

In any case, I made the suggested change, and it works - a file is still attached, but the attachment data is no longer visible under the email body. I'm testing it using OE 6, Netscape 4.5 and 4.7.

I am waiting for our customers response re: email client they use, etc. I will respond to this thread w/ an update once I am able to get more details - in case there is a legitimate issue on their end.

Again, thanks for your help - it has been invaluable.

The latest:

The customer did not respond w/ their name/version of their email client. However, I believe he's using Netscape due to a .vcf file attached to his email.

In any case, I sent an email w/ attachment using the revised script ('Content-Disposition....' version), and he gave the thumbs up.

So, I think the original mimetool actually worked, but the presence of the attached data in the 'preview pane' caused some confusion for the user.


Thanks again.