On 2008-12-23, Paul Hovnanian P.E. wrote:
Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2008-12-21, Paul Hovnanian P.E. wrote:

One can zip, uuencode and all that by hand. But you risk making the post
incompatible with other news readers. Or at least a pain in the *ss to
read. I've seen far too many uuencoded binaries done by hand that
present themselves as the body of the post consisting of a few hundred
lines of gibberish. The reader has to 'Save as' and then decode by hand.
Which is guaranteed to make the less patient give up.

splitting large uuencoded binaries by hand is while a "trivial" task, easy to
foul up.

Sections must be kept below 10k lines each.

The binary must be converted to ascii only. UUencode is the norm.

And what about the Content-type:, Content-Transfer-Encoding: mime
headers and required attributes? There's a lot more going on under the
hood of a binary post than just making a string of silly characters.

the only important header is the subject line, MIME does not support
file-splitting and so cannot be used to transmit large files.

(you could split the file first (eg: using rar) and then require the
recipient to reassemble them

Correct. But once split, I'd leave the uuencoding and MIME headers to
Netscape (or other newsreader). That reduces the manual job to one step,
splitting the file.

N+1 steps
fragment the file, create N posts, (or is there one-step way to select a bunch
of files an create a message for each?)

I hate people who try to hand encode stuff. They make extra work for
people who know what they're doing and totally screw it up for the less
computer literate.

BTW, more often its base64 encoding anyway. I'm not certain what sort of
utilities Windows has to handle uuencoded files.

most news client software handles uuencoded files just fine.