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New messages delivered by PMDF to your mailbox may be read with a variety of programs including mail
, mailx
, Pine, etc. You read these messages as you would any other mail message; no special action is required. Messages delivered by PMDF will have valid From:
addresses and can be replied to with the standard reply commands.
2.3.1 Receiving Binary Files
If receiving a binary file using a MIME aware user agent such as Pine,
the binary file should be extractable and usable.
If you are using a non-MIME aware user agent and receive a MIME encoded binary file, note that the pmdf decode
utility may be used to decode MIME encodings.
2.3.2 Header Lines in Received Messages
There are a large number of fields which can appear in the header of a message. These include familiar things like From:
, To:
, Subject:
, and Return-Path:
and obscure things like Encrypted:
, Resent-Message-ID:
, and Resent-reply-to:
. In particular, if the user agent you use to read your messages does not understand MIME message formatting, you are likely to see headers such as MIME-version:
, Content-type:
, and Content-transfer-encoding
; MIME-aware user agents use these headers internally rather than
presenting them to you, the reader.
When delivering to something which does not understand MIME, there are two choices: either discard the header lines that the user agent does not understand, or insert them somewhere in the body of the message. Neither choice is completely satisfactory --- deleting header lines causes the loss of valuable information but inserting header lines into the message text may interfere with extract commands. PMDF, unless configured otherwise by the system manager, uses the latter approach: PMDF preserves additional header lines by merging them into the text of the message.
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