These test files are Copyright © 2010 Hunny Software, Inc. Samples obtained from http://www.hunnysoft.com/mime/samples/samples.zip Details at https://www.hunnysoft.com/mime/samples/index.html readme.txt ----- The files in this directory that match the pattern m*.txt are sample messages in MIME format from common email Mail User Agents (MUAs). I created these samples mainly for the purpose of testing my own MIME implementation, particularly for testing the decoding of encoded text in the headers (RFC 2047) and for the extraction of attachments (not covered by any standard). I used four different MUAs to create the messages. You can determine which MUA was used by looking at the file name. The breakdown is: m0*.txt -- Microsoft Outlook 00 m1*.txt -- Netscape Communicator 4.7 m2*.txt -- Qualcomm Eudora 4.2 m3*.txt -- PINE (Linux) Of course, you can also look at the headers of the message to determine the MUA. If you want to contribute to this collection of samples, please do send your contributions. I will evaluate the contributions for inclusion in this collection. The evaluation criteria will include: * Is the MUA a mainstream MUA (not some obscure, rare MUA)? * Are the messages short? * Are the messages useful for testing? * Are the messages genuine? Messages that have been through a relaying SMTP server might have been modified. This might not disqualify a sample message, as it probably still has value for interoperability testing. When you send messages, please zip them or tar them, so that they won't be changed as they pass through the mail system. If I include your messages, I will put your name on a list of contributors, unless you prefer otherwise. I am also considering creating a separate collection of messages designed to stress test MIME implementations. So, if you have any good examples of bad messages (but not bad examples of good messages :-), feel free to send them. Not all the messages are correct to the MIME standard. However, since these messages are from popular MUAs, they can be useful for interoperability testing. Please, if you are creating messages, read and understand the standards documents, rather than imitate what you see in these messages! I have included the files that were used for creating the attachments, so you can test that you have successfully decoded the attachments. I have also included a simple Java program that I used for creating these samples. This program, SmtpServer.java, is a simple SMTP server that will receive the message directly from you MUA. This is important, because if you just route the message through your normal SMTP server, the server might make changes to the message. For example, it seems to be common for some servers to convert quoted-printable encoded text to 8-bit text.[1] This SMTP server program records the entire SMTP client/server dialog, which is great if you are trying to debug your mail system, but it also means that you will have to edit the output of the program to get just the email message. The URL for this collection of messages is ---------------------------------------------------- [1] I don't like the fact that this happens, but that's life. I guess the MTA thinks that since it can handle 8-bit text, that quoted-printable encoding is not necessary. However, quoted-printable also makes long lines into short lines, which is something other than converting to 8-bit characters. In general, I think end-to-end transparency is a good thing; anything that interferes with transparency should be avoided.