| Before asking any question do the following: | |
|
|
I don't like useless attachments (especially those coming from people using Micro$oft's bugged outlook) that aggravate my emailboxes: turn them off. If you don't know how to turn them off, read the snippet how to get rid of silly attachments. This is very important, especially for newbies.
THEN PLEASE TAKE NOTICE OF THE FOLLOWING:
COMMON QUESTIONS
(original by Ben Goetter & Gerald Boyd)
I will start to filter all the mail addressed to me that contain HTML coding, MIME encoding, and unwanted Micro$oft attachments such as WINMAIL.DAT. I getting deluged with this junk. Will you newbies please, please, please, turn off this "stuff". M$-Mail has a feature that allows M$-Mail users to exchange fully-formatted messages (fonts, italics, etc.), by attaching an RTF (Rich Text Format) file to the message. Another M$-Mail user will see the formatted version, while any other email program will show the ASCII message plus the attachment. M$ made this option enabled by default, so many M$-Mail users have no idea that they are annoying the rest of the world. When Exchange thinks that it is sending mail to another Exchange user on the Internet, Exchange (more properly, the Internet Mail message service provider) encodes the message, along with attached files, embedded OLE objects, and their associated icons, into a special data block called the TNEF (pronounced tee-neff) block. This block encapsulates the complete original content of the Exchange message, so that the message arrives at its destination with all proper formatting intact, including boldface, underlining, fonts, and colors. Otherwise, Exchange formats the message in an Internet-standard fashion, discarding all rich text attributes and ensuring that all attached files appear as standard attachments. The problem arises when people not using Exchange or Outlook receive a message in the TNEF format: instead of seeing a formatted message, they see a big chunk of UUENCODE data if the sender used UUENCODE format, or a MIME body part application/ms-tnef if the sender used MIME. Depending on which mail program they use, they may either see a long sequence of hexadecimal digits, or they may see an attached binary file named WINMAIL.DAT. Here's how to turn it off: Step #1: . Double-click on the Mail and Fax icon in Control Panel. . Click on the Services tab, and select Internet Mail from the list. If Internet Mail is not listed, click Add - add this service. . Click Properties, and then Message Format. Turn off the option that reads Use MIME when sending messages. . Click OK and then OK again. Step #2: . Double-click on the name of each recipient in your Address Book. . Turn off the option that reads Always send to this recipient in Micro$oft rich-text format. . This option needs to be set for each recipient of a message - if even one has this turned on, all recipients will still get the attachment. Note: Either of these methods should work for most users, but sometimes nothing seems to work - yet another brilliant design strategy by M$. I you plan to be sending lots of internet email, you should seriously consider using a mail program more suited to the task, such as Pegasus or Eudora. Note: A bug in Exchange may cause line feeds to be replaced with equal signs when rich-text mail is disabled. If other people complain that your messages arrive with gibberish or a mysterious WINMAIL.DAT file, then try Rich-Text Sentry. Rich Text Sentry will not work with M$ Office 95 WordMail, since the WordMail forms don't support client extensibility. For the same reason, it will not work with the simplified send note included in the Windows 95 Messaging Update. To get rid of MIME encoding: Check your E-mail program and: Change from: Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Change to: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Turning HTML off in Outlook Express -- Windows 95. Go to Tools and then click on Options ... Go to Edit and then click on Preferences ... Click on Send and choose Plain Text in Mail sending format. Do not forget to unmark "Reply to messages using the format in which they were sent." Turning HTML off in Netscape 4.0 This configuration is the same on all platforms: Mac, Win95, Win3.xx, Linux, ... Go to Edit and then click on Preferences ... Click on the plus before mail and groups and click on 'Messages'. Turn 'By default, sent HTML messages' off. Go to 'More Options' and choose 'Always convert the message into plain text'. Click on OK and on OK again. Let's hope you will not send out any more attached crap...
The info above should be enough, yet you may want to read Gerald E. Boyd's What is wrong with sending HTML and MIME messages? (Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text), on Boyd's pages that are a TREASURE of information about e-mail handling, searching and downloading