- 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.
