Re: [WinMac] Mime vs. HTML mail;Netscape vs. OE

Leonard Rosenthol(leonardr[at]lazerware.com)
Mon, 25 Oct 1999 22:24:00 -0400

At 5:41 PM -0700 10/25/99, Bruce Johnson wrote:
>MIME: 'Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions' The standard way of
>encoding Internet Mail attachments.

        It is also the standard way for doing styled EMail, including
pictures in EMail, etc. (although it's not correct, I've seen
people refer to the first M in MIME as "Multimedia").

>html: is plain text, but with html encodings so a web browser, or some
>variant thereof, such as a mail reader will display the code properly.
>Netscape uses this to send fancy formatted email messages.

        Correct. Also, many EMail clients offer this as an option
(off by default). AFAIK, Netscape is the ONLY EMail client that
does NOT offer an alternative and ONLY uses HTML mail.

>rtf: 'Rich Text Format' is another way of sending fancy formatted
>e-mail, typically from OE.

        RTF is the Rich Text Format, but it is NOT used for EMail it
is used for documents (foo.rtf) and is the standard styled clipboard
format for Windows. Email clients that refer to sending "rich text"
are actually taking about the MIME "rich text" specs which is how you
are supposed to send styled text Email.

>Both Netscape and OE will attach useless email dongles to messages if
>you have it set, such as Netscapes Address cards, and things like
>winmail.dat.

        Yup, Netscape puts all sorts of crud in EMail - business
cards, X.509 certs, etc. But AFAIK, OE does no such thing.

>Base 64 is one way of encoding binary files for sending as MIME
>attachments.

        Actually, Base64 is THE encoding format for MIME messages -
there are even extensions to MIME/Base64 specifically for handling
MacOS files. The use of BinHex or UUEncoding of enclosures
shouldn't happen with a MIME message - only plain text.

>According to the INternet Mail standard, _everything_ has
>to be 7-bit (ie text) so ways of converting binary data to text format
>have been devised, such as base64, binhex, and uuencode (among others).
>
        Yup!

Leonard

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