Quite frequently I receive emails that contain test attachments. However,
those attachments are usually marked as application/octet-stream, either
because the file name has no extension, or because the sending mail program
is misconfigured. I would like the option to be able to view these text
documents (that I *know* are text) in alpine, rather than having to save
the document and fire up less. Currently alpine refuses to show the text,
saying "Don't know how to display Application/OCTET-STREAM attachments.
Try Save."

Firefox suffers from the same problem. Making less the default handler
for application/octet-stream is probably not the best solution, as some
such files really *are* octet-stream, and not text.

Matthew

Me, too. I pipe things to cat and then I can use alpine's built-in pager.

I'll think what can be done about this. If you feel like digging into the
alpine code to help look, that'd be awesome.

Agreed, but off-topic for this bug. (-;

Hi Eduardo,

Here's another Debian bug that I wanted to get your input on --
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=532380 .

Do you think it makes sense for future Alpine editions to allow people to
"V"iew application/octet-stream attachments? It seems harmless, and clearly
desired in some cases.

(I myself have desired this!)

Let me know what you think. It'd be great if you keep the bug in the CC:
line, too, if you're willing to have the conversation be public.

Thanks, as always!

I wish that it was easy to implement that all programs can figure out
automatically what you want to do when you want to open an attachment.
Application/octet-stream means "a bunch of bytes in a file", not a
specific format. It could be an executable program, or a poem. Can't say a
priori.

The bottom line is that when choosing between security and convenience, I
side for security, and it might not be a good idea to view the attachment
if this means that some characters will be passed directly to the screen
without processing.

So my advise is that if you want to view an octet-stream and live
dangerously, that you use the mailcap file to define an application that
will open such attachment (for example, one can define the viewer for an
octet-stream file to be a script that renames the attachment to be an html
file, and then opens it with your favorite browser) and that this should
be done on a per-user basis, instead of a for-all users basis.