A good beginners tutorial is at:
http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/decode.htm
   They show some email fragments before the "attachment stripper" part of
these newfangled email clients gets to it.
     MIME, UU, RTF, and others all have their own methods for flagging
attachments so the first question you need to answer is: "What am I going to
attach and which protocol am I going to use?". I think UUENCODE is probably
the simplest and MIME is probably the most widespread in terms of number of
platforms you can get to without having a computer nerd on the receiving
end.
     If you are going to attach a binary file, you will also need to encode
it. UUENCODE answers both requirements at once. If you send a UU
attachment, it has a UU header and is UUencoded. MIME mostly does BASE64
encoding, but there are other possibilities mostly depending on content.

> ----------
> From: sftalk_at_forth.com[SMTP:sftalk_at_forth.com]
> Reply To: SF Talk
> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 7:48 AM
> To: SF Talk
> Subject: RE: Email attachments
>
> Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 09:41:06 -0500
> From: "Gene LeFave" <gene_at_tekdata.com>
> Subject: RE: Email attachments
>
> The short answer is that they just follow the body of the email. There
> will
> be a boundary definition in the header which separates the email portion
> from the attachments.
>
> I've written some SMTP code, and have run across the RFP's. They are not
> easy reading. The starting place, I think, is rfp1521. If you search for
> references to RFP1521 you'll get more then you want to know.
>
> Gene
>
> >
> > Does anyone know how attachments are handled in email messages?
> > This does not seem to be covered by the SMTP protocol.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Glenn Dixon
> >
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 10:04:39 PDT