E-mail & listsclient view

Anne Villems

University of Tartu, Estonia

Everybody has used e-mail!

But how many have read documents, which set the standards for e-mail?

These standards have been set up in the documents:

RFC 822 / RFC 821 MIME standards set in

RFC 2045/2046/2047/2048

(old verson RFC 1521/1522)

Mail Standard RFC822

Published in 1982 Lines no longer than 1000 char Message body - plain US-ASCII text Message header lines - plain US-ASCII

text Limit on message length

RFC 822 restrictions

no multiple objects in a single message no multi-part message bodies no non-textual bodies no X.400 messages can be gatewayd no multifont messages

ASCII times are over!

Now we want: National language support Possibility to send

– pictures– audiofiles– other applications– video files– multimedia applications

MIME - Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension

RFC 2045-2048 obsolete RFC 1521, 1522,1590 RFC 2045 Format of Internet Message Bodies RFC 2046 Media Types RFC 2047 Message Header Extension for

Non-ASCII Text RFC 2048 Registration ProceduresTo solve RFC822 restrictions without serious

incompatibilities with it

MIME defines new header lines MIME-Version header field:

MIME-Version: 1.0

The content type header field to specify the the type and subtype of data in the body:

Content-Type: Text/Plain: Charset=ISO-8859-1

Content-Transfer-Encoding field to show how data is encoded

Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE

Content-ID and Content-Description for future use

“Content type” possible values Text - textual information Image - for transmitting still images (gif,jpeg) Audio - requires audio output device Video - to display moving images, like mpeg Application - information to be processed by

application program Multipart - to represent compound, possibly

embedded parts Message - an encapsulated message

Content-transfer-Encoding

base64 - every 3 bytes are represented with 4 7-bit ASCII characters

quoted-printable - will code only non-ASCII characters in the text, 76char lines

7bit - no coding, already 7bit 8bit - have to be transported as 8-bit binary - as 8bit, but may contain long lines

Quoted-printable

Suitable to present most European languages which are based on ISO 8859-x standard

Non-ASCII chars will be coded with 3 chars: ´=´ followed by code in base (16) Examples:

Ü =DC ä =E4 ö =F6

Where to get more info about MIME

RFC archive with all RFC-s in plain text:

ftp://ftp.carnet.hr/pub/Internet/rfc/ Mark Grand’s “MIME Overview”

http://www.mindspring.com/~mgrand/mime.html comp.mail.mime FAQ

http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/text/faq/ usent/mail/mime-faq/

How e-mail works

User Agent (UA) - program, with which human users read, create and manage e-mail

Mail Transport Agent (MTA) - handling the movement of messages among computers, non-real-time manner; SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - must be installed at every Internet Host

Working protocols

• SMTP - primary mechanism for moving mail around TCP/IP network, handles sites with permanent connections

• SMTP delivers mail, not allows user to collect it - sometimes the latter is more convenient

• POP, IMAP - fill the gap, they are oriented to serve users when they want

POP, IMAP

Aim - to build a distributed e-mail infrastructure

LAN oriented, vendor specific POP - Post Office Protocol, latest

version POP3, RFC 1725 (1460) IMAP - the Internet Message Access

Protocol, latest version IMAP4, RFC2060 (1731)

What we want from Mail client?

Good user interface advanced text editing spelling checker attachments allowed addressbook (with

groups!) MIME uudencode/decode

Encryption! + mailing lists pager support multiple accounts multilingual support full text indexing +

search message filtering

…and more

…more requirements for mail client:

signatures (multiple?)

database sophisticated send:

send e-mail to all my students who live in Liberty street

download headers and delete mail from server based on header info

UseNet Newsgroups Live spelling Thesaurus auto-dialing Free Internet Fax Confirmation ability … …

Mail Clients

You can find 28 mail clients in Tucows ultimate software collection for Win95, 13 for Mac and 11 for win 3.x

They need from 65K to 4.5M memory Tocows has mirrors in many countries

one in Croatia:

http://www.hrt.hr/tucows/

Most popular clients The Pegasus Mail, no fee, version 2.54

http://www.pegasus.usa.com/

FAQ http://www.let.nl/pegasus/faq.html

Eudora (Qualcomm Inc.)– Eudora Pro 3.0.3– Eudora Light 3.0.3

http://www.qualcomm.com/

Problems going from Eudora to Pegasus

Your Adressbooks are not convertible. There exists Interguru Web-site to help

you to convert Eudora nickname file to Pegasus address file:

http://www.interguru.com/eudopega.htm

To compare Mail Clients

Stroud’s Mail Client Reviews with about 20 packages reviewed:

http://cws.internet.com/32mail-reviews.html

Intervue Internet Client reviews:

http://www.eqp.com/egrinter.html Tucows has evaluated all packages with

0.5 - 5 cows.

Some words about Netiquette Be polite! Cite as small part of the letter as

possible! DO NOT USE UPPER CASE LETTERS

THROUGHOUT THE LETTER Use “smilies”: :-) :-( ;-) Take differencies in the culture into

account.

Questions

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