Netscape woes

[Walt Howe]

At 12:27 PM 7/7/97 -0700, Jacques Presseault wrote:
>I have installe Netscape Communicator 4.01 but it seems that when I send
>send a WORD  file as an attachment to a message, it is somehow turned
>into a zip file.
>
>How can I prevent that?

A Word file is a binary file, not a text file. Binary files must be encoded
into a 7-bit text form when sent through e-mail. What is most likely
happening is that your e-mail software is automatically encoding the Word
file in MIME base-64 encoding (or less likely uuencoding or binhexing it)
and the software of the person you are mailing the file to does not support
automatic decoding, so that the file is received in unusable form.

Does this sound like what may be happening? If so, the alternatives are for
the recipient to get software that will handle it, or for you to save the
file in a usable, all-text form. One option is rich text format (rtf),
which Word and e-mail will handle without further encoding.


    Walt  <http://people.delphi.com/walthowe>