MIME type application/octet-stream

[Graham Todd <gtodd@yorku.ca>]

Lately people have been sending me WPD word processor documents as
attachments that are encoded with MIME content type
application/octet-stream.  Gnus won't allow me to read them by middle
button clicking on the the MIME widget in the mail body and launching
my viewer - instead it asks me where to save the document. This
behaviour is consistent with Pine and VM as well.

However if I read the same mail article in Netscape's mail reader
(with the attachment sent as application/octet-stream) I can click on
the attachment icon and it will launch my viewer.

I have this entry in my ~/.mime-types file:

type=application/wordperfect  \
desc="WordPerfect Document"  \
exts="wpd,wp6,WPD"

and this in my ~/.mailcap:

application/wordperfect;/usr/local/bin/applixviewer %s

If the article is sent with application/wordperfect encoding
everything works fine in Gnus.

Is Gnus supposed to fall back on the extensions defined in
~/.mime-types if it can't determine how to handle content from the
type/content lines in ~/.mailcap? Is octet-stream some lowest common
denominator encoding that needs more configuration (by the user -
i.e. me) to be handled properly? (perhaps some kind of ~/.mailcap
entry for application/octet-stream or setting a gnus-* variable). Or
is Netscape's behaviour just "non-standard"?

Thanks,

-- 
Graham Todd        
York University, Toronto  
http://www.yorku.ca/academics/gtodd