Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!rice.bitnet!schafer
From: SCHAFER@RICE.BITNET (Richard A. Schafer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT mail system // CMU Andrew System // "groupware" software
Message-ID: <647SCHAFER@RICE>
Date: 31 Oct 88 04:30:26 GMT
References: <2463@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> <10426@s.ms.uky.edu>
Organization: Rice University - ICSA
Lines: 44

In article <10426@s.ms.uky.edu>, david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) says:
>
>In article <2463@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> mayer@hplabsz.UUCP (Niels Mayer) writes:
>>
>>Could someone who has used the NeXT mailer comment on it's
>>functionality.
>
>
>While I haven't used their mailer I think I'm qualified to make
>some educated guesses :-)
>
>Voice/picture type stuff is usually in some binary format.  There's
>no reason to suspect that this would be any different here.  BUT, in order
>for it to be part of e-mail it has to be in printable ASCII.  No
>funny characters, and some limits on what you can assume about tabs
>and/or end-of-line markers.
>
>Now, where to store it?  It'll have to be part of the message somewhere.
>Putting it down in the body would be "inappropriate" because the system
>isn't really supposed to interpret things in the body, and also this
>is more an "envelope" type thing.  A better place (er.. more appropriate)
>would be in the header somewhere.  BUT, I can see a problem that this'd
>lead to large headers ... and I won't gaurantee that all systems or
>user-agents will be able to handle a header that's on the order of
>4 or 5 Kbytes.  (That's a bit beyond the norm for headers).
>
>What *I* am curious about is which mailer is at the transport level?
>--
><-- David Herron; an MMDF guy                              <david@ms.uky.edu>
><-- ska: David le casse\*'      {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
><--
><-- Controlled anarchy -- the essence of the net.
>
I talked to the NeXT people about this at Educom'88, where they were
demonstrating the system.  The NeXT mail is supposedly "the standard
Unix mail", and the voice extras are in fact transported in the body
of the mail (at the end) as printable ascii characters, with (I believe)
a piece of human readable text saying that the following is voice data.
The NeXT modified code would read it and interpret the voice data.

Richard Schafer


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