It all started back in those wild and turbulent '70s. The gold rush
was on. Electronic mail was being sent from computer to computer
using FTP programs. You did read that right, it does say FTP. Every
one using a computer on the internet knew what Get> and Put> meant.
But this FTP stuff posed a gestalt or thing-in-itself problem for
some because FTP really does not care about stuff like from:, to:,
subject: etc. , and so forth. Heated discussions were taking place
and things were getting quite hectic.
Then a person by the name of Abhay Bhushan sent out his manifesto
that began with the innocuous title: RFC561;
Standardizing Network Mail Headers
One of the deficiences of the current FTP mail protocol is that
it makes no provision for the explicit specification of such
header information as author, title, and date. Many systems
send that information, but each in a different format. One
fairly serious result of this lack of standardization is that
it's next to impossible for a system or user program to
intelligently process incoming mail.
Although the long-term solution to the problem is probably to
add commands for specifying such information to the mail
protocol command space (as suggested in RFC 524 -- 17140,), we
hereby propose a more quickly implemented solution for the
interim.
Read paragraph two closely! RFC stands for Request For Comments, and
if only "they" had taken a few more months to hire some decent sci-fi
writers to prognosticate about what folks would do with the Arpanet,
we would have have a very different internet mail protocol. RFC561
turned into something different which itself turned into RFC822, a
document still in place today governing text-style emails. There are
other RFC documents that govern the how's and why's of email. Those
documents get interpreted in various ways by the folks that write
email software and so one email app will attach things at the top and
one will put them in-line and one will put them, well just where is a
mystery. Add to this the fact that the gateways (the big connections
between the various networks) are allowed to mangle messages as they
see fit and you get a mess arriving in your mail box sometimes.
It is a wonder the things work at all. It is a bigger wonder why the
docs are called RFCs when they end up being the governing guidelines.
Jerry
On Sep 23, 2005, at 9:35 PM, Anne Cartwright wrote:
> I am trying to find out why when I send an attachment (.jpg) the
> recipient can sometime open it but sometimes not. I assume he has
> an non Apple PC.
>
> Also when I attach something to my e-mail message it sometimes
> shows up just below my message and then again other times the
> attachment shows up as the attachment icon which must be clicked on
> to open.
>
> My poor mind would greatly appreciate an explanation to both the
> above.
>
> Anne Cartwright
>
>
>
> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
> | be September 27 at Pitt Academy, 6010 Preston Highway.
> | The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
> | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu>
> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
>
-----------------------------------
Someday, I will come up with a clever signature line. I am not sure
if I will use it or not, but I will come up with one.
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