Sending Attached Files

Sending Attached Files

Most of the popular e-mail programs enable you to send attached files with your e-mail. In other words, if I were working on an Excel spreadsheet, I could attach it to the e-mail message and the recipient would receive not only the message but also a copy of the spreadsheet.

There is usually an Attach File button or menu command prominently displayed in the message composition window, as you can see in Figure 3.5. Just select that button or command, and a dialog box appears prompting you for the file's name and current location. Locate the file and click OK, and the file's name appears on a line in the message composition window, so you know it's attached.

Some e-mail programs enable you to attach multiple files to an e-mail; Microsoft Exchange does, for instance. However, Netscape Navigator's mail program, and most online services mail programs, do not. That means if you have more than one file to send, you either have to send separate messages for each file or you have to use a compression program like PKZip or WinZip to store all the files in a single compressed archive to send.

Online Services and File-Sending

Although most online services enable you to send files, they allow file-sending only to members of the same service. For example, CompuServe users can attach binary files to messages, but only to other CompuServe users. Similarly, America Online users can send files only to other America Online users. Internet users can send files to anybody, but recipients on online services may not be able to use the sent files; they may come across as a screenful of gibberish.

Why is this so? Because e-mail is a plain text medium. In e-mail's purest form, it isn't possible to attach a binary file to a message. File attachment is accomplished by encoding the binary file with a scheme that converts the file to a long text-only string of what looks like gibberish. The recipient's e-mail program at the other end decodes it and it turns back into a binary file. Most Internet e-mail programs recognize the MIME method of conversion. However, many online services use their own proprietary conversion scheme, and can't decode MIME-converted files coming in. If a program can't decode a MIME file, it leaves it unconverted�that is, as a long string of gibberish text. So if you see a screenful of meaningless text, what you're probably seeing is an unsuccessful attempt to send you a file.