Hello to all who didn't delete,
(And, again my apologies to those, like me, who are on the di-
gest and didn't have a delete choice). I am a computer/technical
instructor by trade and I tend to go overboard (more than) a bit
in technical explanations On Sat, 27 Nov 1999, SIR JAMES1st
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ... What =
> I thought you said was, when some attachments aren't sent right they =
> come out as code on the other end ...
> Also if you wouldn't mind, what the h_ll is a,"MIME-encoded post" ...
Your understanding is correct. All communication on the In-
ternet relies on a "protocol" to ensure that a message will get
transferred completely and accurately to its destination. A pro-
tocol is nothing more than one computer saying "are you there?"
to another computer, the other computer replying "yes, I am, send
the first packet." A packet is nothing more than a collection of
information that contains a portion of the intended communica-
tion. The two computers use the "protocol" to send the "packets"
until the transfer has been completed correctly.
You may have seen a Web URL starting out with "http://www ..."
(most browsers don't require the http:// anymore -- it is usually
the default). The http stands for "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol"
and is the "protocol" used on the World Wide Web. E-mail, on the
other hand, uses a different "protocol" called SMTP --Simple Mail
Transport Protocol
The "simple" in SMTP really says it all. This simple protocol
is a *text-based* protocol. All e-mail messages must be text or
the message cannot be "transport"ed. The SMTP protocol says that
all e-mail messages must start with a blank line followed by a
nonblank line that must start out with "From " and continues un-
til the next occurrence of two adjacent lines that contain the
exact same text. *Everything* in between must be text. (This is
why you will see the word "From" at the beginning of a line pre-
ceded by a ">" -- the mailer is trying to ensure that it isn't
interpreted as the beginning of a new message.)
In the "modern" world of today's Internet, it quickly became
obvious that people wanted to send more than just text. So, a
method was created in which binary files -- images, sounds,
movies, etc. -- could be included in an e-mail. Since all e-mail
had to be text, the "method" was to turn the binary file into
text data. This "method" is usually called encoding and used to
use something uuencode but more recently uses something called
MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions). The major draw-
back to these encoding methods is that the text version of the
data is usually bigger than the binary form.
And this didn't seem to be enough to satisfy all Internet
users. Still other people wanted to be able to include the same
types of things that you see on a Web page -- fonts, hyper-text
links, headings, images, and the like -- in their e-mail messages
as well. So in addition to the binary file encodings, a method
was established to include HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) in
an e-mail message as well. And the MIME mechanism was extended
to allow for it.
Most e-mail users use an e-mail client (a program that commu-
nicates with a server using a protocol) that understands and au-
tomatically interprets MIME in their e-mail messages. But,
*many* people don't! There are still a *large* number of Inter-
net users who prefer to send and receive their e-mail in text
format. This means that GIF, JPEG, and the like attachments
don't get decoded; this means that HTML doesn't get interpreted.
People who use the standard UNIX mail clients like mail and
mailx, or other clients such as pine, elm and many, many others
will see:
------=_NextPart_000_0340_01BF389F.F55AFE40
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"]
[HTML][HEAD]
[META content=3D"text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1" =
http-equiv=3DContent-Type]
[META content=3D"MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=3DGENERATOR]
[STYLE][/STYLE]
[/HEAD]
[BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff]
[DIV][FONT face=3DArial size=3D3]Bill,[/FONT][/DIV]
[DIV] [/DIV]
[DIV][FONT face=3DArial size=3D3] Not being very =
technical I=20
didn't fully understand your note. What I thought you said was, when =
some=20
attachments aren't sent right they come out as code on the other end. =
I've had=20
...
Where the sender actually saw:
Bill,
Not being very technical I didn't fully understand your note.
What I thought you said was, when some attachments aren't sent right
they come out as code on the other end. I've had ...
And, where some people see: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 sender actually saw a "pretty picture."
> ...
> it the sender or the receiver doesn't have the right program ...
Actually, it's neither. Some people prefer to use mail
clients that "do it all." They send and receive e-mail with all
of the MIME "bells and whistles" included. Others prefer to use
a text-based client and use other programs to view images, listen
to sounds, and to play movies.
The bottom line is really simple. If you want the widest pos-
sible audience to be able to read your e-mail messages with the
fewest complaints, you send a text-based message. If you have an
image, sound, or movie you want to share, you tell the person
that you're sending the message to that it's available and can be
sent to them in a separate message if they are interested.
> ... As you my =
> or may not know I have a habit of sending small attachments and I try =
> not to send the reply to waste space. Is there a clean way to send gifs? ...
I won't try to force my opinion on you -- I am *very* opinion-
ated about e-mail. :-) But, I think that most of the above ex-
planation will answer this question.
As to including the reply, the reply -- depending on how many
levels of quotes within quotes within quotes there are -- may ac-
tually take up *less* space than a GIF image. And, most readers
actually prefer a *little* snippet of the original message that
you are replying to so that they have a context in which to un-
derstand your reply.
> ... And =
> what do you mean by "being on the digest" ...
Almost every mailing list on the 'Net comes in two versions.
The regular version -- sometimes called the "bounce back" version
-- takes each and every message that comes into the list and
bounces it back to each and every subscriber on the list. The
digest version, on the other hand, saves up several messages and
sends the group in bulk when some size or time limit has been
reached. On the Parkinson's mailing list, it is not at all un-
usual to get four or five digests in a day and each one will be
anywhere from 20,000 characters to 60,000 characters long.
If a person belongs to more than one mailing list (at times, I
have been known to belong to as many as five or six), it becomes
a major effort to sift through the hundreds of messages that ap-
pear in your mailbox. For these types of people, it is much more
convenient to get a batch of messages all at once -- in a digest
-- to scan through the messages at their leisure. Again, on the
Parkinson's list, it is not unusual to have anywhere from two to
thirty messages in a single digest.
> ... Won't you take a moment to =
> help out a simple minded soul ...
As is my nature -- as many folks on this and other lists can
attest -- I have taken more than a moment. But, again as is my
nature (being a teacher by profession), I sincerely hope that
this long-winded explanation might help just one list-member have
a better understanding why text messages are best and why unso-
licited binary attachments are generally frowned upon.
(I won't extend this any further by explaining why my signa-
ture uses only text characters and must be displayed in a mono-
spaced font to be "seen." :-) )
Take care, thanks for "listening," and (as I have been known
to say in closing a note) always grok in fullness ...
Bill--
...who, if at first he doesn't succeed, redefines success.
.___. William A. ....._..._ .......7177 Heritage Drive+--------- (42?) --+
| _ \__ _ _ _ _ _ ___| |_| |_ ___ .Westchester........| /\_/\ / |
| _/ _` | '_| '_/ -_) _| _/ -_).OH 45069-4012......| ( o.o ) |
|_| \__,_|_| |_| \___|\__|\__\___|.513/779-0780.......| > - < |
..... http://w3.one.net/~wap/ .... [log in to unmask] .......+------------------+
