Philip Ayres said:
As to why I came out strangely - MIME once again rears it's ugly head.
Nick is it them or us causing the problem ? (Come to think of it has anyone
seen Nick ?)
Sorry, I was on holiday, skiing in les trois valees in the french alps.
Fantastic, by the way.
MIME, yes... for those that don't know... Email is, was, and is likely to
remain, for a long time, a way of sending PLAIN "ASCII" TEXT ONLY. The
underlying "Simple Mail Transport Protocol" doesn't support binary data like
pictures, zipfiles, word documents, excel spreadsheets, audio files,
executables, or even anything remotely non-standard in text... Even our
POUND SIGN isn't theoretically legal because it's not in the AMERICAN ASCII
text standard.
Ages ago, someone inventied "uuencoding", which was a way of taking binary
data and converting it to a (larger) text file that looks a bit like this:
begin 644 foo.gif
MR?6R6B5K1D])6<\^<*X4$2MD/[G91H4:G*<M*,Z5^O)ULJJM(A2+6BG9=M8
M=991F8UE;V&%VTB&UJYE-1A4L<I<JSJWN<T][E^36[#?SHJV&1MNJW;:SNYZ
M][O@)V,:9=5MGTO.A-+S=%^UI4JO>]\+4I>UM*7VO5EZ3EO2]KJ:M?@.:W
MO^3E+X!=*N!W_._!BX8@/<KP4SV*@%?GZ'2QA<QDEO!C.L(8WS.$.>_C#
[etc etc etc]
>(ZQB$=,8@']\0H3K&*5\SB%KOXQ3".L38#@[
end
This text file could then be sent by email, and decoded by the guru at the
other end.
Then someone invented MIME. Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions are
basically a way of adding attachments to email. You add a few lines of magic
to the headers, then there's actually a similar encoding system to the above
used, because the underlying mail protocol still uses ASCII TEXT ONLY, but
your mail software can then tell a little more about what the file is, and
can display a pretty attachment icon. that was the idea of MIME. It needs
mime-capable software on both ends to work 100% properly.
... then microsoft, and to an extent netscrape, decided to abuse te MIME
standard and do stuff like "text and HTML mail in the same email!" - a
stunning way of making your email 4 or 5 times the size it ought to be, and
pretending you can do colours and fonts and stuff. Problem number one.
... then RHUL's mail server seems to have a problem with MIME. Remember at
the start of the year when you'd send a mail to the list, and everyone
EXCEPT RHUL STUDENTS would recieve it fine, and RHUL's copies would just
vanish without a trace or an error? Well, one of your friendly sysadmins
told me this was something to do with MIME. As a result, I added some stuff
into the mailing-list software to strip the magic mime HEADERS, and just
leave the body the same.
This means... with "normal" emails, there's no problem at all, but when
you've added an attachment, or when your "clever" email software has decided
it's going to make your email 4 times bigger and add an extra HTML copy, you
get to see what's REALLY sent instead of what you THOUGHT was sent.
To fix it... in netscrape, it's something like "edit", "preferences", "mail
and news", "formatting", "use the PLAIN TEXT EDITOR to compose messages" (IE
NOT the HTML one). I'm not sure what the equivalent options are in micro$oft
outlook, but basically you want to remove any mention of "HTML" and "rich
text" and stick to "plain text" or "ASCII". This will stop you accidentally
sending messages that are 4 times the size and containing broken HTML MIME
attachments, and they'll look a whole lot nicer.
Nick Waterman. Senior Systems Administrator, Sony Interactive Services
mailto:nick-sig@ http://www.nilex.co.uk/~nick/
AX25:G7RZQ@#32.GBR.EU #include <stddisclaimer> Team *AMIGA*!
If everything seems to be going well, you have overlooked something.
