E-mail is a convenient tool for transmitting short, simple messages. Although some mail programs offer limited text formatting, the majority cannot send or receive messages that include italics, bold type, or underlining.
In order to address this limitation, most mail software, including Pine and Eudora (the two packages supported by NACS), allow users to send “attachments” with their e-mail messages. An attachment is any small file that accompanies an e-mail message. You might imagine an attachment as a document or picture which is enclosed in an envelope along with a cover letter. Upon receipt, the file is detached from the e-mail message, after which it can be opened by an appropriate software application, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or WordPerfect.
Unfortunately, mail attachments do not always work seamlessly, especially when files are transferred from one platform to another or between different versions of software. To help you use this technology to its best advantage, we have assembled the following guidelines:
- Use MIME to encode messages, not Binhex or UUencoding;
- Do not send more attachments greater than 70,000 total characters in size;
- Use 8 letter file names with a 3 letter extension to make your attachments legible by users of older DOS/Windows machines. Example: PAPER.DOC;
- Include separate attachments in multiple file formats (Word, WordPerfect, RTF) if you do not know what software your correspondent has available.
To read the reasoning behind these guidelines, and find out more about attachments, please see the following Web document:http://eee.uci.edu/doc/attachments