A Periodical

Dr. Marshall T. Rose does a useful thing with multi-media e-mail. He mails out each issue of his SNMP-related newsletter, The Simple Times, in these formats:

  1. in a PostScript form, with beautiful typesetting and a two-column page layout, suitable for printing on a laser printer;

  2. in richtext form (to be explained later on), suitable for display on a mildly intelligent ASCII terminal;

  3. in a plain text form.
When you subscribe to The Simple Times, you specify in which form you want to receive the newsletter.

(SNMP is the Simple Network Management Protocol, having naught to do with MIME or MH per se.)

The process by which Dr. Rose creates an issue of The Simple Times begins with documents in LATEX markup language format. A filter program is applied to strip the LATEX constructs to produce plain ASCII text files. Another filter program is applied to convert the LATEX constructs into richtext constructs. (The plain text and richtext files may require some additional editing to look reasonable.) The PostScript version is the result of applying LATEX to the original version of the document followed by an appropriate PostScript-producing post-processor, such as dvips.

Dr. Rose was kind enough to provide this mhn draft template as an example of how he created the plain text MIME version of Volume 1, Number 4 of The Simple Times:

Reply-to: The Simple Times <st-editorial@simple-times.org>
To:       The Simple Times Subscribers <st-editorial@simple-times.org>
Dcc:      st-mime-subscribers
Fcc:      outbox, simple-times/1.4, /var/lists/simple-times/mime
Subject:  The Simple Times, volume 1, number 4

#begin      [The Simple Times]
#begin      [Issue Information]
Content-Description: Masthead

The Simple Times(tm)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bi-Monthly Newsletter of SNMP Technology, Comment, and Events   (sm)
Volume 1, Number 4                               September/October, 1992
------------------------------------------------------------------------
#text/plain [READ-ME]                   ../../lib/mime/read-me.txt
#text/plain [Disclaimer]                ../../lib/mime/disclaimer.txt
#end
#begin      [Issue Contents]
#text/plain [Technical Article]         technical.txt
#text/plain [Industry Comment]          comment.txt
#begin      [Featured Columns]
#text/plain [Applications and Directions]applications.txt
#text/plain [Ask Dr. SNMP]              faq.txt
#text/plain [Security and Protocols]    security.txt
#text/plain [Standards]                 standards.txt
#text/plain [Working Group Synopses]    synopses.txt
#end
#begin      [Miscellany]
#text/plain [Announcements]             announcements.txt
#text/plain [Recent Publications]       publications.txt
#text/plain [Activities Calendar]       calendar.txt
#end
#end
#begin      [Administrative Information]
#text/plain [Publication Information]   ../../lib/mime/publication.txt
#text/plain [Submissions]               ../../lib/mime/submissions.txt
#text/plain [Subscriptions Information] ../../lib/mime/subscriptions.txt
#end
#end

The structure of the message appears as follows, as shown using mhn -list, with some blank lines and indentation added for slightly easier reading:

msg part  type/subtype          size description

  1        multipart/mixed       93K The Simple Times                 

    1      multipart/mixed      1682 Issue Information                
      1.1   text/plain           314 Masthead                         
      1.2   text/plain           377 READ-ME                          
      1.3   text/plain           668 Disclaimer                       

    2      multipart/mixed       88K Issue Contents                   
      2.1   text/plain           16K Technical Article                
      2.2   text/plain          7864 Industry Comment                 
 
      2.3   multipart/mixed      60K Featured Columns                 
        2.3.1 text/plain        7223 Applications and Directions              
        2.3.2 text/plain        7568 Ask Dr. SNMP                             
        2.3.3 text/plain        7820 Security and Protocols           
        2.3.4 text/plain         14K Standards                        
        2.3.5 text/plain         22K Working Group Synopses           
 
      2.4   multipart/mixed     3172 Miscellany                       
        2.4.1 text/plain        2345 Announcements                            
        2.4.2 text/plain         118 Recent Publications                      
        2.4.3 text/plain         361 Activities Calendar                      

    3      multipart/mixed      3077 Administrative Information       
      3.1   text/plain          1032 Publication Information          
      3.2   text/plain          1155 Submissions                              
      3.3   text/plain           534 Subscriptions Information

The richtext version has the same structure as the plain text version, except that richtext-format files are used in place of the plain text files.

Because the PostScript version is one large file, suitable for printing, the PostScript message doesn't use the full structure shown above for the plain text version; just a single part of type application/postscript is specified:

Reply-to: The Simple Times <st-editorial@simple-times.org>
To:       The Simple Times Subscribers <st-editorial@simple-times.org>
Dcc:      st-postscript-subscribers
Fcc:      outbox, simple-times/1.4, /var/lists/simple-times/postscript
Subject:  The Simple Times, volume 1, number 4

#application/postscript [The Simple Times] stv1n4.ps