Updating Simeon MIME Types

Making MIME attachments work:

When you send attachments through email, they must be encoded so that they can be transmitted as ordinary text. The standard internet protocol for sending attachments is to use an encoding scheme called MIME. One feature of MIME is that the sending email program inserts a field into an outgoing message identifying what type of file is contained inside the encoded attachment. By looking at the information in the MIME header that was inserted by the sending program, the program which receives the attachment can "do the right thing" with it. For example if the MIME header identifies the attachment as a spreadsheet (e.g. MIME type= application/ms-excel) then the receiving email program can launch the appropriate spreadsheet program to open the attached file.

Two things need to be done to make sending and receiving MIME attachments work smoothly.

1. All users must agree on a common set of names for different attachment types. For example, all email programs should identify excel spreadsheet attachments with the MIME type of "application/ms-excel", or "text/html" for an attached web page.
2. Users must "train" their email program by telling it which program to use to open attachments of a particular type. For instance, if you use Netscape as your Web-browser, then you you must tell your email program to launch Netscape when you want to view a attachment of type "text/html."

Making MIME attachments work with Simeon:

The following steps will help you if you are having difficulty getting Simeon set up to send and receive attachments.

1. Go and download the newest copy of Simeon. Older versions (before 4.12) of Simeon ask you to fill in more information than is necessary in most cases, making it easy to get confused and mess things up. Newer versions have numerous bug fixes and performance improvements as well, so it's worthwhile to go fetch the latest.
2. Install the new copy of Simeon, but don't run it yet until you have completed step 3.
3. Update your MIME-type information on the options server.
4. Start Simeon.
5. You now have two options:
   1. You can either go through all the different MIME types (27 at last count) and tell Simeon what helper application to use for each. Or,
   2. You can wait and tell Simeon what helper application to use the first time that you receive a document of a particular type.

Defining Helper Applications in Simeon:

a. Setting up helper applications ahead of time.

This section gives an example of the steps used to configure Simeon to use a particular program to open an attachment you receive.

1.	Access the Helper Applications window by selecting Edit from the Tools/Options menu and click on the Helper Applications icon.
2.	In the Helper Applications window select a viewer to configure from the drop-down list.  By default, the first item on the list is "Audio aif".   To follow along with this example, scroll down to "Microsoft Word Document"
3.	Fill in the "View with..." box to state the location of the software you will use to view this type of document.  If you are unsure of the location, the Browse button will allow you to access your system hard drive and network drives to locate the appropriate executable.  If you have Microsoft Word on your hard drive, enter its location by typing it in (for example c:\program files\msoffice\word.exe) or browsing to find it.
4.	The Attachment Types field contains the content type and subtype. For example, "Microsoft Word" has the type Application and the subtype is msword.   By default, this has already been filled in for you.
5.	File Extensions for the Selected Attachment is the same as the file extensions associated with the document itself and reflects the content types and subtypes selected, in this case doc. The file extension(s) need not exactly match the subtype. For instance, if you receive a WordPerfect file with the extension wpf but do not have WordPerfect on your system, you may elect to load it into Microsoft Word. In this case you would need to add wpf as a file extension
6.	The completed dialog box should now look like the following, although the contents of the "View with:" line may differ.
7.	Repeat steps 1-6 for as many of the predefined document types as you recognize or expect to receive.  At a minimum, it is recommended that you configure viewers for the following document types which seem to be most common: Image GIF Image JPEG Microsoft Excel Microsoft Word Plain Text HTML Document Zip (if you use a PC) Binhex (if you use a Mac) Stuffit (if you use a Mac)

b. Setting up helper applications the first time you receive an attachment of a particular type.

It is also possible to configure helper applications in Simeon on-the-fly instead of ahead of time.  You may need to do this if you receive a new type of attachment, or an attachment for which you have not yet configured a viewer.  This technique requires a little more care to avoid associating more than one viewer with a given mime-type or vice-versa.

1.	When you receive a message that contains an attachment, you will try to open it by double-clicking the attachment icon in the lower pane of the Simeon viewer window.   If Simeon does not recognize the attachment type or has not had a viewer configured to handle the attachment type, it will request that you define the program to view the attachment with using the following window:
2.	If the attachment is of a type that is already defined, but for which you have not yet defined a viewer program, you should select the document type from the list at the bottom of the dialog and then click the "Browse..." button to go find the viewer application on your hard drive.
3.	If the attachment is of a new type, then you should select <New> from the lower list, then click the "Browse..." button to find a program you wish to use to view the document.  You can use the information in the "Attachment Properties" panel to help you decide which application to use.   In the illustration above, the primary clue is the MIME subtype: MSWORD.  You might also recognize that ".doc" is the standard Windows extension for a Microsoft Word file. When you click OK, you'll get a small dialog box asking you to name the new document type that you just "trained" Simeon to recognize:
4.	Simeon will then launch the configured application to view the attachment.

More help with MIME configuration:

Reference:

The following 27 MIME types are defined for use with Simeon. These are fairly standard and should work with other email programs and with documents sent between Vanderbilt and other institutions. You are free to add additional MIME types within Simeon to suit your needs.