[thechat] listiquette

[Judah McAuley]

Tamara Abbey wrote:
> O.k., this is something that has always bothered me about e-mail formatting
> -- I use Eudora v.5 and I have a little drop down box.
>
> I can choose MIME
> BinHex
> Uuencode

Mostly, you should just stick with MIME.  The only times you might have
to deal with BinHex or Uuencode is when you are working with
attachments.  And you shouldn't have to worry about that most of the
time either.  Most modern email clients do MIME encoding just fine.
BinHex used to be used when sending attachments between Macintosh users.
  The BinHex encoding helped make sure that the resource fork wasn't
munged and therefore the file type would no longer be recognized.
Uuencode is left over from Usenet posting days.  It allows binary
information to be encoded using ASCII.  There was a problem for quite
some time that many mail clients would use an 8 bit character encoding
(allowing 256 characters) but some machines (especially old mail servers
and relays) would only use a 7 bit system (allowing 128 characters).
This savings of 1 bit per character was a big deal many years ago.  But
it also meant a lot of headaches when people tried to use 8 bit
programs.  So then you get all of these various hacks and work arounds
like BinHex and Uuencode to make systems function together.

Fortunately, there is much better interoperability in the computer world
today.  That's why Standards Are A Good Thing.

Hope this helps.

Judah

> Since there are problems on theList, I'm afraid to ask there, but how
> should I be replying?
>
> . . . waiting for winter in Illinois . . .
>
> tamara