MIME and Emacs

In this multimedia hungry world (country?) of ours, people have begun to send MIME encoded mail. I find it to be rather annoying, if I wanted pictures I'd use Emacs-W3 or Nutscape to find them. But my students seem to enjoy MIME encoding the text files they send me, so I've been forced to incorporate MIME capabilities into my reader. First, what is MIME? Well, check out the MIME FAQ which is posted to the newsgroup comp.mail.mime. Read it? Now you should know everything there is to know about MIME. When do you use MIME? When reading usenet news or email. Gnus is the standard usenet news reader for Emacs and XEmacs. There are multiple mail readers for Emacs: the aforementioned Gnus, RMAIL, VM, and mh-e. There seems to be a shortage of documentation for MIME and Emacs, so I thought I'd compile a list of what's available. I found some of the packages, and others were revealed to me by people visiting this site. Please, let me know if I am missing anything. Thank you to everyone who provided pointers to packages I had not included.

What's your pleasure...

RMAIL tm metamail.el rmime.el Gnus tm rmime.el VM tm metamail.el rmime.el vm-metamail.el tra-vm-mime.el native support mh-e tm rmime.el Mew other possibilities

metamail.el

	metamail.el, rmailmime.el, and mime.el are three packages that work together to provide a complete MIME solution for RMAIL and VM. I happen to use them with RMAIL because they are basically unnoticeable until you need to use them. They do, however, require metamail application to be installed on your computer.
	Download local copies: Original copy: metamail.el v 1.9 mime.el v 1.64 rmailmime.el v 1.12 all three tarred and gzipped emacs-mime-tools.shar
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tm

tm provides a very thorough MIME solution for RMAIL, Gnus, VM, and mh-e. Many people have high praise for tm. Personally, I found that it altered the RMAIL interface enough for me to not want to use it. tm is also large, and takes a little bit of installing (it took me 2 minutes of reading, 1 minute to make the changes, and compilation time). But, on it's plus side, if you've got XEmacs, tm integrates beautifully with Gnus (check out this screen shot of Gnus and tm. And evidentally it will soon be shipped with Emacs (no installation at all!) Check out the tm Manual. And grab most recent version . Lo and behold, (X)Emacs 20 has come out and there is a new version of TM that works with the 20.x releases. Evidently TM has a lot of baggage to support backwards compatibility, and SEMI is designed to take advantage of the new emacsen. Check out the README.em file, and download the latest version from this directory.

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rmime.el

	rmime.el is designed to add MIME capability to RMAIL, and works with VM, gnus, and mh-e. There is a homepage for this package.
	Local copy: rmime.el 1.2 Original copy: rmime.el
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vm-metamail.el

	Per Persson (pp@sno.pp.se) wrote a package for VM, it uses mime.el and metamail.el (see above). I checked it out, and it worked out of the box using Emacs 19.30, VM 5.96beta.
	Local copy: vm-metamail.el Original copy: vm-mime.tar.gz
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tra-vm-mime.el

	tra-vm-mime.el is another package that adds MIME support to VM.
	Local copy: tra-vm-mime.el 1.18 Original copy: tra-vm-mime.el
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native-vm

	VM itself now supports MIME encoded messages. This works with both XEmacs and Emacs, XEmacs displays the images inline. Try installing VM.
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Mew

	Mew (Message interface to Emacs Window) is a MIME mail reader (with PGP support) loosely based on MH. The author of Mew doesn't like MH, and is slowly changing the functional interface. I haven't tried it, but the documentation seems very thorough. Check out the Mew homepage.
	Local copy: mew-1.68.tar.gz (4/1/97) Original copy: mew-current.tar.gz
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other possibilities

	mime-compose.el mime-compose.el is a package for composing MIME mail in RMAIL, VM, or mh-e. It is not a MIME reader. This requires the binary mmencode (distributed with the metamail application - (see above).
	Local copy: mime-compose.el Original copy: mime-compose.el
	contrib There are a few packages distributed alongside the UNIX metamail source. They appear to be very old and I don't recommend them when there are such fine alternatives (see above).
	Local copy: contrib2.7.tar.gz Original copy: contrib2.7.tar.Z
	If none of these options attract you, and you wish to add MIME capability to your mail reader in Emacs, let me know, it doesn't seem too hard (using metamail).
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trey@cs.berkeley.edu http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~trey