#Internet help
4 messages in this thread
Jeff, Thanks so much for responding promptly. Your message is like a voice
from the wilderness! No one I've talked to seems to understand Internet enough
to answer my questions intelligently. I understand that Internet works with
ASCII from your message, so that leads me to ask how do I keep the local host,
digitalNation, from translating my attached files into binary. And more
importantly, how do I get AutoPilot. I'm not familiar with it.
Chip,
AutoPilot is available for download in demo form in Lib 9 of the
AmigaVendor Forum. It is an automatic forum and messaging program for
CompuServe. AutoPilot requires an Amiga with harddrive and AmigaDOS 2.04
or greater.
I'm not familiar with digitalNation. It's probably a Unix system. Is
your access menu driven, or do they have you using command line prompts?
It sounds like digitalNation thinks that you are attaching binary files
and is "uuencoding" them for Internet email transmission. If you can give
me a step-by-step account of what you are doing, I might be able to make a
suggestion or two to help fix the problem.
Jeff Schweiger
I think you haven't got a clear picture of what's happening yet…
Many e-mail programs used for the Internet (or other mailers, for that matter)
have a way to deal with "attachments." These are not necessarily ASCII or
binary. They can be either type. However, the software will typically use the
'uuencode' technique to encode the file for transmission, *under the assumption
that all attachments are binary.*
For example, I once used Compuserve Easyplex mail to send binary files to
someone across the Internet whose mail eventually got forwarded into a ccMail
server on a PC network within his company. I composed a single text message at
the top of the file, then included a 'uuencoded' file at the bottom of the
single text file that I sent across the Internet. He was quite surprised when
ccMail automatically recognized the 'uuencoded' file at the bottom of my
message, re-converted it to a binary ccMail attachment, and delivered it as a
message that looked like someone else had sent him a binary file across the
local network.
So, if you want your text files to stay text files, don't use attachments. Use
a text editor to join your messages together, then mail that.
At this point, most mailers understand MIME, so MIME attachments are OK.
MIME attachments have the advantage that they are ASCII, so you can decode
them with a tool similar to uudecode even if you receive the docs on a
non-MIME mailer.