USING NETSCAPE MAIL
- MAIL ATTACHMENT
Sooner or later, just plain, old, everyday e-mail isn't good enough for you. Someone's gonna send you a picture you just have to see, or you will want to send a cool graphic to your friend on the east coast. When we talk about sending stuff other than text through the mail, we're talking about using special formats and systems that can read them. Sometimes the entire message is in a special format, and sometimes people attach things to their mail.
Attachments come in three different formats:-
- MIME: Stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.
- Unencoding: A method of including information in e-mail; invented back in the days of UNIX-to-UNIX e-mail.
- BinHex: Stands for binary-to-hexadecimal.
The technical details of these three methods are totally uninteresting and irrelevant. What matters to you is that your e-mail program, must be capable of detaching incoming files that other people send you, preferably using any of the three methods.
You can generally send a file as an e-mail attachment by using your regular mail program to compose a regular message and then give a command to attach a file to the message. You send the message using the program's usual commands.
When you receive a file that is attached to an e-mail message, your mail program is responsible for noticing the attached file, and doing something intelligent with it. Most of the time, your mail program saves the attached file as a separate file, in a folder or directory you specify. After the file has been saved, you can use it just like any other file.
For example, you can send these types of files as attachments:
- Pictures, in image files.
- Word-Processing documents
- Sounds, in audio files.
- Movies, in video files.
- Programs, in executable files.
- Compressed files, such as ZIP files.
If you successfully receive a program as an attachment, don't run it unless you know the person who sent it - the program could have a virus.
If you receive a message with an attachment that uses a methods (MIME, Unencoding, or BinHex) that your mail program doesn't know, the attached file shows up a large message in your mailbox. If the attached file contains text, most of the message is readable, give or take some ugly punctuation. If the attached file contains sound or pictures, the message is totally hopeless because the message just contains binary digitized versions of the images and not any sort of text approximation.
To send a attachment in Netscape Mail, click the Attach button in the message you're composing. Unlike most other mail programs, Netscape lets you attach any file or document you can describe with a Uniform Resource Locator; or URL (the naming scheme used on the Web). It gives you your choice of attaching a document, by default the last message or page you were looking at.
Netscape 4.0 gives you even more choices! If you attach a file, you can click the Browse button to choose the file to attach. When you have decided what to attach, click OK to attach the file to the outgoing message. Netscape attaches files by using MIME.
For incoming mail, Netscape displays any attachments that it knows how to display itself (web page, GIF and JPEG image files). For other types of attachments, it displays a little description of the file, which you can click on, at which point Netscape runs an appropriate display program, if it knows of one, or asks you whether to save the attachment to file, or to configure a display program, which it then runs in order to display it. Netscape can handle all three attachment methods.
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