Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 12:48:57 GMT From: ruth moulton <ruth@muswell.demon.co.uk> To: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> Cc: ruth@muswell.demon.co.uk Subject: Email [was: Squid will that be fried ?] Message-ID: <199803261248.MAA02467@muswell.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <19980326061948.63584@welearn.com.au> References: <Marcel-1.42-0324172959-0b0Zsav@duffner.konstanz.netsurf.de> <Pine.WNT.3.95.980324102339.-21791C-100000@greymouser.circle-path.org> <199803250858.IAA01513@muswell.demon.co.uk> <19980326061948.63584@welearn.com.au>
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Sue , > Please, if you must use Netscape or any microsoft or other nonstandard email > application, first ensure that: > 1. You have thoroughly studied http://www.lemis.com/email.html > 2. You understand what it says > 3. Your email app (or whatever) is set up to comply, and > 4. You know how to use it to ensure it complies > Sue - what do you mean by a 'non standard' email application ? - I read the document you suggested. It mentions there are RFCs which are the standards for Internet e-mail, but not which ones. People might be interested to know there are three basic standards SMTP - RFC821 - this is the mail transport protocol - it specifies how to send mail round the network - for most people it's not very interesting - but this is where the basic line length limit comes from RFC822 - this is the basic format of a mail message - it defines the headers (TO:, CC: etc) and a simple body made up of us-ascii text (i.e. the message itself). This was fine for when it was written, but nowdays we expect to be able to ship more complex messages, for example a scanned image, a word file, forward another message, a notification that a message could or couldn;t be sent, and also use other character sets than good ol' us-ascii - our friends from russia, scandinvia, spain, france, israil, japan... will tell you why! > Also make sure that it doesn't send > out HTML or any other attachments, whether it tells you it's sending them or > not. and finally we have MIME - RFC2045-2049. This defines how to encode non us-ascii text and attachments so that they can be represented in ascii and hence sent by rfc822, and also how to devide the single 822 body into multiple parts using ascii separators. (There are a few more that give further refinements to MIME). These documents are available by anonymous ftp from ds.internic.net or http://www.internic.net/ds/ RFC stands for 'request for comment', they're the documents in which the internet standards are defined. So, the point of all this verbage is that is perfectly OK to send attachments (What email.html says is don't send them unnecessarily), as long as they conform to the MIME standards. To send and receive them your email user interfaces (user agents in e-mail jargon) must be MIME enabled. I'd rather encourage the use of MIME, ultimatly it enables a much more intelligent e-mail service, not discourage it, but it does need to be adhered to properly (unlike some of the stuff I've seen from MS). I suppose the real problem is that MIME and RFC822 are both extensible and what MS do nowdays is define thier own proprietry extenstions that are legal by MIME standards, but unusable to non MS software - I'll join you in trying to ban this stuff!! ruth -- ================================================ Ruth Moulton ruth@muswell.demon.co.uk Consultant 65 Tetherdown, London N.10 1NH, UK Tel:+44 181 883 5823 -- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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