Message-ID: <39C65E36.A3F16831@acm.org> Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 09:25:58 -0400 From: Dave Tweed Organization: almost none X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: attachments (was Re: DRDOS FDISK) References: <000201c02164$428e4480$e7881004 AT dbcooper> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Patrick -- > Hmmmm, I guess you are not able to receive HTML messages. I'll see if there > is some way to set it to automatically send text only for this particular > address. I have my mail set up to use a nice looking stationary and the > server that gets this or the server that receives these messages must > convert them to text and use attachments for the HTML portions. When I reply > to a text message, it automatically replies in a text format. > > I don't know why some people are having this problem. makes it tough to send > URL links in text mode. I receive messages in both text and HTML formats. I > like the HTML ones, because I can simply click on the links. I do not have > these problems. I get a message in HTML or text, whichever way the author > sent it. I suspect that some of the people complaining, have a seerver > somewhere along the line that is converting my messages to MIME format. > > I really do not know what I can do on my end. I just write messages in HTML > format and am not going to change my stationary for a few people that have > problems with HTML. I find it amazing that someone who knows so much about the low-level workings of disk formats and operating systems knows so little about how the Internet works. Usenet email and news predate the Internet by a little bit and predate HTML and the WWW by quite a bit. Usenet was originally implemented as hosts periodically phoning each other up using the uucp protocol. The *only* thing they transport is text -- anything else must be converted to text (e.g., uuencoded) before it can be sent. The MIME protocol allows the body of a mail or news message to contain several related but distinct parts. Usually the first part is the ASCII text message, and the other parts are considered "attachments". Most of the mail and news clients these days make this process so transparent that users don't realize what's going on at the actual network level. For example, when you send "HTML mail" using "stationary", your email client (not some server) is actually creating a multipart MIME message that starts with a text-only version of your message, then an HTML version with markup, the background image of your "stationary" and any additional images containing logos or letterheads. This is what the rest of us, using ordinary clients see, and since the first part contains the useful part of your message, the rest is seen as bandwidth-wasting fluff. When *you* look at the message, your client is picking apart the multiple pieces of the message and rendering them the way you expect. I'm sure it must look very nice to you, but from our perspective, it makes you look somewhat ignorant, inconsiderate and wasteful. As far as being able to click on links in text messages, those of us using Netscape have no problem -- it has the ability to recognize a fully-specified URL* in a text message and render it as a clickable link. Evidently you need to do a cut-and-paste in whatever tools you're using. You might want to search for different tools. -- Dave Tweed * fully-specified as in: ://[:][/path ...] e.g., http://www.delorie.com/opendos/news.html