Thunderbird & Okular question

[Tim]

On Sun, 2010-01-31 at 21:24 +0100, DB wrote:
> I assume there is no way to persuade TBird/Okular to play ball with
> the octet-stream?

There's no good way to handle that.  It's the generic description for
any binary file (sound, picture, PDF, whatever), that hasn't been
specifically identified.  If you were to hard-configure it to presume
PDF, it'd fail on the next thing that wasn't a PDF but described as
being octet-stream.

Wild guess:  The problem email you're dealing with was generated using a
Microsoft system.  They've had thirty (?) years to get a grip on
properly using MIME types, but haven't learnt it yet.

About the only simple solutions are:  Save the file, then open that.
Or, pass the file to a handler that can manage sending different data
types to the right applications by inspecting what the file actually is.
The "gnome-open" program seems to do that, though I've only given it
brief testing.

*BUT* if you're going to use a handler as a middle-man, make sure its
one that won't automatically execute scripts and programs, by default.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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