Dealing with e-mail attachments in Athena

If someone sends you e-mail with an attachment:

There are three ways to deal with receiving attachments in Athena, depending on which e-mail program you use.

1. If you use Netscape to read e-mail, the process is simplest; the attachments are represented by boxes at the bottom of the e-mail message, containing links. Shift-click (hold down the shift key and click using the left mousebutton) on the linked text in the box representing the attachment, and you'll be prompted to type in the name of a file that the attachment will be copied to.

2. If you use mh or xmh to read mail, there is an alternative e-mail package called exmh that is compatible and that can work with attachments. To use it, run:

add sipb
exmh &

Scroll through the list of messages to find the one with the attachments, and click on it to select it. The message itself will appear in the bottom pane of the exmh window, and attachments will be represented by underlined and boldface text. Right-click on the underlined text to get a menu that lets you:

i. Save it to a file (this is generally what you want to do)

ii. Print it (which won't always work)

iii. Send it to metamail, which will attempt to display it. This will work for images, animations and sounds, but generally not for Microsoft word documents and such.In general you should just save it to a file.

3. If you use other e-mail packages, the first step is to save the entire e-mail message to a text file. Then run these commands (substituting the name of the saved file for filename below.

add mime
metamail filename

It will prompt you for whether the enclosure should be displayed or saved. (It is generally better to save it.)

There are also instructions for using command-line decoding utilities in Athena's olc (online consultant) database. Run olc answers, select the menu entry numbers for MAIL answers, then Answers on MAIL FORMATS, then How to View MIME Messages. For additional information on MIME, see the Insider article MIME support on Athena.

Once you have the enclosure saved, you can transfer it to a PC or Mac where you can run whatever application is needed to work with the file.

To send someone else an attachment:

First, copy the file you wish to enclose into your Athena home directory, using fetch (from a Macintosh), ftp, or whatever. Remember that images, Word documents and almost all file types except flat text need to be transferred in binary mode to avoid corruption.

If you normally use mh or xmh, you can use exmh to create mail messages with attachments. To start it, run:

add sipb
exmh &

And do the following:

1. Press the Comp button to create ("compose") a new mailmessage.

2. Type whatever text you want to appear at the beginning of the mailmessage, to form a cover letter or description of the contents.

3. Click on the More... menu, then the Attachments entry, then Attach File.

4. Select the file you wish to attach from the list.

5. Make sure the file type is correct ("image/jpeg" or "application/ms-word" or whatever), so the recipient's mailreader will know what kind of application to invoke to read the attachment.

6. Click on OK. The attachment will be encoded and inserted into the current mailmessage.

7. Click on Send.

If you use a different mail package, there are instructions in Athena's olc (online consultant) database. Run olc answers, select the menu entry numbers for MAIL answers, then Answers on MAIL FORMATS, then How to mail a BINARY file.