Process Software - PMDF Technical Notes

The Undocumented thurman Channel Keyword

Note: This feature is unsupported.

The channel keyword is "thurman". If you place it on the first PMDF channel to see a message, typically your incoming TCP/IP channel, tcp_local, then for messages that come in with no MIME headers, PMDF will sniff through them looking for uuencode or binhexed "blobs" and pull such blobs out into separate attachments, creating a MIME multipart message in the process.

Doing this sniffing can involve quite a bit of additional overhead, since PMDF doesn't normally have to bother looking at message content. This is why using the thurman keyword is generally not recommended.

There are lots of different and incompatible variants on uuencode. PMDF (and the thurman keyword) probably recognizes more variants on incoming messages than anything else can; incidentally, when you have PMDF emit uuencoded stuff, PMDF emits the most conservative, easily recognized uuencode variant we've found.

Note that if you start using the thurman keyword, you'll likely also want to take a look at MIME relabelling, as described in section 6.3.2 of the V6.5 PMDF System Manager's Guide. The thurman keyword causes uuencoded blobs to get pulled out in generic APPLICATION/OCTET-STREAM; name=... attachments. If you can count on the folks who send you such blobs following some consistent file naming convention, then you can use the file name information to make a guess at a more specific labelling.