What can I send with Electronic Mail?

When electronic mail was designed it was intended to only send (short) textual messages. After Email started to be more popular the users also wanted to send other information like formatted WordPerfect documents, programs, pictures, etc. Because these other information are not textual (they are binary), it is not possible to send that information directly. The information first needs to be encoded to some form of textual information before it can be send. On the receiving end the information can then be converted back to it's binary form.

The most common conversion for Email is uuencode/uudecode. This converts binary information into text blocks of approximately 70 characters wide and usually starts with a capital M:

begin 644 data.ico
M```!``$`("`0``````#H`@``%@```"@````@````0`````$`!```````@`(`
M``````````````````````````````"```"`````@(``@````(``@`"`@```
    :
    :
M````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
M````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
!````
`
end

Whenever you see an Email message like this it means that you Email software was not able to automatically convert the uuencoded textual information back to it's binary form. In some Email programs you can select uudecode from the menu to manually decode the data, or you would have to save the message to disk and use a DOS or windows program to decode the data (in DOS type: uudecode filename).

When sending Email accross the world, please note that some E-mail hosts may have limits on the size of the message. There are Email systems in which Email is limited to 32Kbytes. This is after encoding any binary data which increases the size by about 1/3rd.

Contents

Prev. Page