---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: "Elizabeth L. Brown" <ebro@LOC.GOV>
Subject: Listserv attachments - what happened?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello,
Curious minds want to know.....
Karen was the first to attempt to send an attachement over Amfellows.
Here's what we learned: Attachments don't fly well over our listserv.
If you have word-processed data you want to share, please "copy" the text
from your word processor and "paste" it into the body of your message (as
Susan has done today).
EMAIL transmission protocols are "looking" for ascii characters. What
happens is YOUR email software encripts the message so that these email
gateways think attachments are just ascii characters. MY email software
usually understands this encryption and deciphers the messages just fine.
For exmaple, most of the photos some of you sent arrived just fine.
The Library's LISTSERV software isn't as smart as OUR individual email
software products, so attachments are distributed and received
still-encrypted. This is what happened with Karen's message.
There are tools out there to manually decode these things, but I don't
think we all want to install them on our computers. If you want to try,
the most popular encryption tool is known as MIME, followed, in some order
by BIN-HEX and UUE (and probably others). I've seen decoders on the WWW
(some free) and have even downloaded tried a few.
If anyone is REALLY interested in more on this subject, write to me off the
list, and I'll explain further.
Later,
Betty
_________________________________________________________
Elizabeth L. Brown, M.L.S.
National Digital Library Program, LIBN/NDL/VC(1300)
Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540-1300
ebro@loc.gov telephone: 202/707-2235
Library of Congress American Memory Home Page:
http://memory.loc.gov/
_________________________________________________________
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 04 2000 - 12:24:07 EST