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Re: your mail



Thanks very much for your detailed reply Stefan.

Herb Gottlieb

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999 23:22:32 -0400 Stefan Jeglinski <jeglin@4PI.COM>
writes:
Thanks for the help Larry. Does AOL and Compuserve transmit and
receive
HTML?
I have been using Juno e-mail service which permits "attachments"
but
evidently not the HTML..


If I'm not mistaken, the way this works is two-fold.

First, there must be a valid content header. That is,

"Content-Type: text/plain" leads to plain text presentation by your
client
"Content-Type: text/html" leads to a web-like presentation by your
client

These headers originate with your e-mail client (as does the
construction of your mail as a web-like page) and get sent along with
your e-mail content.

Second, these headers must be preserved all the way to the
destination. Assuming your e-mail client creates these properly, any
intervening MTA that mucks improperly with the headers (maybe munging
them on purpose even) OR if the recipient e-mail client doesn't
properly read these headers or know what to do with them, you will
get unpredictable results.

AOL and Compuserve have a lot of proprietary mechanisms established
to better serve their customers, and I don't know if outsiders always
play well with them. Juno's excuse may just be they're cheap :-) I
don't use any of them, so I can't rightly comment.

There are still a lot of vintage machines and gateways out there,
especially gateways that will munge anything still not sent in 7-bit
ascii format, hence the on-going need for binhex or gz or uuencoded
attachments. The content-type "text/html" is quite new in
internet-years, so there also may be MTAs out there that slam
anything that isn't text/plain. For this reason, I stay away from
html formatted mail, and for the most part delete without analysis
any mail that comes to me that way (most of it is spam anyway in my
experience).


Stefan Jeglinski