
					  Mar 3, 1995
					  Martin Wendel
					  Torbjorn Wictorin
					  UDAC
					  (C) SUNET


Emil v2 - A Conversion Filter for Internet Messages.
******************************************************

Emil v2 is a filter for converting Internet Messages.
It supports three basic formats: MIME, SUN Mailtool and
plain old style RFC822. It can be used with sendmail, as
a mailer, or as a prefilter or backend program with a mail 
client program, or as a plain filter.

Emil v2 is a complete rewrite of Emil-v1. New features
are support for RFC1522 headers and a more robust basic
structure.

The purpose of Emil v2 is to facilitate the official
migration to MIME for Internet Mail on SUNET (the Swedish 
University Network), on hosts or sites unable to support 
MIME. The migration is due on 1 Jan 1995. Information
about this is made available by SUNET at
http://www.nada.kth.se:/sunet-mime/index-en.html.


What is Emil?
*************

Simply put, Emil is a message format converter for Internet
Messages. This is a general description:

* Emil is able to convert the format, headers and structure, 
between messages of type MIME, Sun Mailtool and old style 
RFC822.

* Emil is able to convert the encoding of binary data 
between the types Base64, BinHex and Uuencode.

* Emil is able to convert the encoding of text to and from 
the MIME encoding Quoted-Printable.

* Emil is able to convert character set of text between the
character sets made available by Keld J. Simonsens strncnv
package. The strncnv package handles a large number of 
character sets, as specified by RFC1345.

* Emil contains two special conversions for text:

	- 7bit body conversion, which is a one-way 
	  conversion of 8bit text to the swedish national 
	  variant of ISO-646.

	- 7bit header conversion, which is a one-way 
	  conversion of 8bit text to characters in US-ASCII 
	  of the closest resemblance.

* Emil is able to convert to and from RFC1522 format headers.

* Conversion can be configured by a configuration file, 
emil.cf, using sender, recipient and recipient host as input 
parameters or by command line arguments.


Why Use Emil?
*************

* In the SUNET case, usage is obvious. A national network 
decides to migrate to MIME formatted mail. Emil is used 
by the hosts or sites unable to support MIME. The effect 
is outgoing MIME messages and incoming non-MIME messages.

* Another example is non-MIME sites receiving occasional 
MIME messages. Emil can be configured to convert these
incoming MIME messages to old style RFC822 and convert
the Base64 encodings to uuencode or BinHex.

* Emil can be used as a tool. A user unable to decode MIME
messages can convert those messages using Emil.

* et cetera.


Copyright
*********

Emil v2 is Copyright SUNET (The Swedish University Network).


License
*******

Emil v2 is made available under the terms of the GNU 
General Public License.


Where can it be found?
**********************

Emil is made available by anonymous ftp at
ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil among other
sites. The latest version can always be found at ftp.uu.se.


The Authors
************

Emil v2 is written by Martin Wendel and Torbjorn Wictorin
both employed by UDAC, Uppsala university in Sweden.


