Full Sail: Power User TipsSending and Receiving Attachments with PinebyNorman L. De Forest Beacon Correspondent
Remember our little alien invader in the Beacon article, "Sending Email With Lynx"? He's back. Let's take a peek into his diary where he describes how he
Notes, References, Footnotes, and Disclaimers are available at no extra cost. November 8, 1999.Dear Diary: Well, here am I back on this Egg-forsaken planet again. Supreme Headquarters wouldn't accept our recommendation that this planet be avoided and have ordered us to return and find some wedge to use to conquer these beings. They have assigned us a Team Leader that is totally out of touch with reality concerning these beings. One of the few good things here is the variety of arts developed. Lately, one of my favourite daydreams involves my having the Team Leader's eyestalks in one hand and a book about something called "macrame" in another. One difficulty in investigating this planet is caused by the fact that although they don't appear to have any organised plans for keeping information away from outside aliens, they seem to have a multitude of organisations devoted to keep information away from each other! And I have found out about one such organisation that is apparently investigating us. Fortunately, I was able to obtain decoding information for their secret messages to send to Invasion Headquarters. The procedure was fairly simple: First I downloaded the file to my own home directory where it would be accessible to pine. I then composed the message to include with the decoder, addressing it to Invasion Headquarters: PINE 3.95.iB1.0 COMPOSE MESSAGE Folder: INBOX 0 Messages To : Invasion Force Headquarters <ifh@ifh.if> Cc : Attchmnt: Subject : A decoder for intercepted secret Lumber Cartel messages. ----- Message Text ----- Although I have not received any response from Norman De Forest, I have investigated his web site and have found some information that may have a bearing on our invasion plans. A link on his site refers visitors to "http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel". Investigation shows that this "Lumber Cartel" is currently operating a project to intercept and decode interstellar communications which may pose a threat to the secrecy of our invasion: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5362/seti.html Fortunately, I have been able to download from one of Norman's pages, "http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/Tips.html#lc13" a key to the encryption code used by the Lumber Cartel. I am including it as an attachment. -- Namron Tserof Ed ------- 083fa@chebucto.ns.ca To err is human. Really fouling things up requires an Arcturian! ^G Get Help ^X Send ^R Read File ^Y Prev Pg ^K Cut Text ^O Postpone ^C Cancel ^J Justify ^W Where is ^V Next Pg ^U UnCut Text^T To Spell Then I moved the cursor to the header area and selected the line that read Attchmnt: and the menu at the bottom of the screen changed: ^G Get Help ^X Send ^R Rich Hdr ^Y PrvPg/Top ^K Cut Line ^O Postpone ^C Cancel ^D Del Char ^J Attach ^V NxtPg/End ^U UnDel Line I pressed Control-J for Attach and was prompted with this: File to attach: ^G Get Help ^T To Files ^C Cancel I could have typed in the name of the file to attach but it is a lot less error-prone to select the file from a menu so I pressed Control-T for To Files instead. For a moment I was notified the system was busy sorting the file names:
[ Building file list of /csuite/home/fa/083fa... ]
^G Get Help ^T To Files
^C Cancel
... and then I got a list of the files available:
PINE 3.95.iB1.0 BROWSER Dir: /csuite/home/fa/083fa
mail (dir)
Mail (dir)
News (dir)
public_html (dir)
alien_links.html 903
AltaVista-search-biowarfare.html 2.9K
comsat.txt 146K
invasion_links.html 133
lynx_bookmarks.html 12.6K
rot13.zip 1.6K
UFO_links.html 15.3K
x-welcome.html 736
? Get Help E Exit Brwsr - Prev Pg D Delete C Copy
S [Select] W Where is Spc Next Pg R Rename
I selected the file, rot13.zip with the down-arrow key. (I could also have used 'w' (whereis) and typed part of the name and pressed ENTER to get to the file.) I then pressed ENTER with the file selected. I was then prompted to provide a description for the file: Attachment comment: ^G Get Help ^C Cancel I typed in the description: Attachment comment: Lumber Cartel decoder ^G Get Help ^C Cancel When I pressed ENTER at the end of the description, the file was now shown as attached to my message. Had I wanted to send more than one file, I could have repeated the process as often as necessary.
PINE 3.95.iB1.0 COMPOSE MESSAGE Folder: INBOX 0 Messages
To : Invasion Force Headquarters <ifh.if>
Cc :
Attchmnt: 1. /csuite/home/fa/083fa/rot13.zip (1.6 KB) "Lumber Cartel decoder"
Subject : A decoder for intercepted secret Lumber Cartel messages.
----- Message Text -----
Although I have not received any response from Norman De Forest, I have
investigated his web site and have found some information that may have
a bearing on our invasion plans. A link on his site refers visitors to
"http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel". Investigation shows that this "Lumber
Cartel" is currently operating a project to intercept and decode interstellar
communications which may pose a threat to the secrecy of our invasion:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5362/seti.html
Fortunately, I have been able to download from one of Norman's pages,
"http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/Tips.html#lc13" a key to the encryption
code used by the Lumber Cartel. I am including it as an attachment.
--
Namron Tserof Ed ------- 083fa@chebucto.ns.ca
To err is human. Really fouling things up requires an Arcturian!
[File /csuite/home/fa/083fa/rot13.zip attached as type APPLICATION/ZIP]
^G Get Help ^X Send ^R Rich Hdr ^Y PrvPg/Top ^K Cut Line ^O Postpone
^C Cancel ^D Del Char ^J Attach ^V NxtPg/End ^U UnDel Line^T To Files
I now pressed Control-X to indicate I was finished editing and attaching...
Send message?
Y [Yes]
^C Cancel N No
...and pressed 'y' to send the message. (I could have also pressed ENTER.) The message with the attachment was then on its way to Invasion Headquarters. November 9, 1999.Dear Diary: I fouled up. I saved a message from Invasion Headquarters to read later and didn't notice that it had some attachments until after I had downloaded it and deleted it from my mail directory. Fortunately I had already downloaded the free utility package uudvd05d.zip that includes the UUDEVIEW.EXE programme that can extract these attachments so I didn't have to upload the file back to my mail directory to extract the attachments. First I made sure that I was in the right directory where I had downloaded the message:
C:\INVADER\DOWNLOAD\NOV99>dir
Volume in drive C is DISK1_VOL1 Serial number is 0021:7D62
Directory of C:\INVADER\DOWNLOAD\NOV99\*.*
. <DIR> 11-09-99 1:18
.. <DIR> 11-09-99 1:18
SAV-MESS.N22 157182 11-09-99 1:44
157,182 bytes in 1 file and 2 dirs 163,840 bytes allocated
6,930,432 bytes free
Then I executed the command "uudeview sav-mess.n22" to
extract the attachments. Each time the programme prompted me with
"[d] (?=help)" I just pressed the ENTER key to accept
the default of decoding the attachment with the original name:
A directory listing showed the attachments neatly extracted:
If the attachment had a name that was not allowed on this system or if
I had preferred another name, I could have pressed 'r' for
"rename" instead of ENTER or 'd' and given another name
to use:
If I had tried to extract the files with other files of the same name already
existing, UUDEVIEW would have asked if I wanted to overwrite the existing files
or rename the attachment: Dear Diary:
The PHBs back at Invasion Force Headquarters have dumped
more work on me. I checked my email today and found
this waiting for me:
What a load of junk! I almost missed the message from Headquarters which was
in the next screenful of messages:
I read the message. More stupid work for me!
I pressed 'v' for View Attachment and selected
the attachment:
Pine's menu read:
I pressed 's' for "Save" and got this menu:
I pressed ENTER to accept the default name, "biowar.exe" and briefly
saw this message:
... immediately followed by:
I then was able to exit the view menu with 'e', exit pine with
'qy' and use the 'gfiles' shortcut to go to my home directory
and download the file.
That wasn't so hard. I now logged off my account and
am now about to run this stupid program that Invasion Headquarters sent
to me.
Hmmm! Nothing is happening on the screen but the disk drive seems rather busy.
I'll wait a few minutes. [Time goes by.]
The disk activity has stopped but nothing else seems to be happening.
I'll try pressing ESC. Still nothing. Control-C? No.
Control-Break? No response there either. How about
Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Even that does nothing. OK, I'll turn off
the computer and then turn it back on. What's this?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhh!
To spare your sensibilities, we now take leave of our frustrated little alien.
Unfortunately, it seems that he forgot one thing. Always check downloaded
files for viruses or trojan-horses with a good anti-virus
scanner before doing anything with them if you don't know for certain
that they are plain text files. Even files from someone you know could
be infected. This includes all program files and any document that may
contain macros. Note that the file name is not always a sure indicator.
I have seen an alleged *.rtf file that was really an infected Microsoft Word
document (it contained the W97M/Wazzu.A macro-virus) with the wrong file
extension on it. It was downloaded from a Microsoft web site.
For those of you who are not familiar with the publishing usage of the
words "by" and "with", in the earlier Beacon article,
"Error 404: That Page Is Still On Break" or "Who's Home When The Web Page
Isn't" by Norman L. De Forest Beacon Correspondent with
Andrew D. Wright, the word "with" really means "by" and the
word "by" really means "with information supplied by". In
other words, I sent some URLs and quotes to Andrew and he did all of the work
writing that article.
You may direct comments or suggestions about this column to:
Norman L. De Forest,
af380@chebucto.ns.ca
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