Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!wjs From: wjs@milton.u.washington.edu (William Jon Shipley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT multi-media message file format Message-ID: <9304@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 16 Oct 90 02:53:55 GMT References: <8242@milton.u.washington.edu> <8263@milton.u.washington.edu> Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 35 Mark Crispin writes: >Ahem. You said "formatted something like". The's the whole point. >It's pretty easy for a human to take a NeXT Mail message and >unscramble it on some other platform. It is quite another thing for >an application to do so with all possible forms of NeXT Mail, much >less compose a message that is guaranteed to be compatible with NeXT >Mail, without a *complete* specification. Mark and I have been going back and forth on this for quite a while now. Actually, it's not "something like", it's really simple. You uudecode, uncompress, and untar. You then have one or more files, one of which will be called "index.rtf". This is a (surprise!) rtf file that supports a '\attach' extension, which says "insert myfile right here, please". The other files will have been untarred when index.rtf was. This is tres handy because it means you don't dictate what file formats your target machines understand; I could send someone a tiff file, but a Mac users could send a PICT file to another Mac user, and assumedly a Mac version of the mailer would understand this as readily as the NeXT version understands tiff. The only objection I have to Mail's encoding is that messages aren't readily readable from non-NeXTs. This is still a problem in 2.0. My solution to this problem is to diff (not quite diff, actually) the rtf message and a text-only version of the message, and start the message with the text version, and then tack on a ^L, followed by the diffs to change the text version back into rtf, followed by compressed and encoded files that may be attached. I've suggested this scheme to NeXT, they didn't seemed overwhelmingly thrilled by it. -william shipley once more, just a student