EMIL version 2 TUTORIAL

# TUTORIAL FOR EMIL VERSION 2.1

Written by Martin Wendel, ITS, Uppsala university. Martin.Wendel@its.uu.se

## COMPARISON WITH EMIL VERSION 1

Emil version 1 has been in use for about a year at UDAC as well as at other sites around the world. While initially aimed at handling character set translation and the Quoted-Printable encoding of MIME in the Nordic countries, the scope of Emil broadened to encompass translation of the encodings Base64, BinHex and uuencode as well. This together with the ability to transform headers in messages made Emil version 1 a tool for converting between message formats. Emil version 1 was based on interpreting a message as a sequential structure; this made it awkward to handle hierarchical and nested messages. The configuration language used was not so well suited to handle conflicting message formats.

Emil version 2 is an attempt to fix some of the flaws in version 1, for example allowing hierarchical structures and a direct interpretation of the format grammar, and being even more general does not restrict usage to message conversion. Now the primary aims are encoding, decoding translation and interpretation.