There are some definite problems with using attached files! Internet communications (due to it's old origins) can only transmit ASCII (7 bit text) files. Files such as WORD, tif etc. are Binary and must be encoded (converted) into ASCII files before sending and then decoded after sending. Some gateways such as AOL, CompuServe (just recently) and others do this automatically so it's transparent to the user. Unfortunate many others do not do this, so the user must encode/decode these attached file themselves using some utility such as WINZIP. Another complication is that there are at least 2 different methods of encoding used, MIME & UUE. (Note: MIME is the latest and preffered method!). But, these are NOT compatible! So you can see that the "average" user can get very frustrated when trying to send or decode attached files. Of course compressing the files, say with ZIP is another complication. If you have not (yet!) experienced these problems it's probably because you only send attached files back & forth on the same gateway/network or you're just lucky! However, having said all that, I do agree that when you know how to do it, it all works well! As an experiment, I'm attaching a very small WORD file (TEST.DOC) encoded in MIME. For those who wish, please e-mail me directly (best not to clutter the pstc!) if you're able to read the message or not! I will tabulate the results and post them! Tony O'Hara Colorado
TEST.DOC
Description: Binary data
