TidBITS#516/07-Feb-00 ===================== Adam packages up the topic of email attachments in this week's issue, passing on tips and looking at how you set attachment formats in the major Macintosh email programs. We also present an overview of the most popular Macintosh graphics programs (you'd be surprised by the age of some of them), note the release of AirPort 1.1, call for more translators, look at the iTools user agreement brouhaha, and ask how many Macs you've purchased over the years. Topics: MailBITS/07-Feb-00 Poll Results: They Come in Colors Email Attachments: Who Does What Copyright 2000 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved. Information: Comments: --------------------------------------------------------------- This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by: * READERS LIKE YOU! You can help support TidBITS via our voluntary <- NEW! contribution program. 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Download our catalog at: or call 800/527-1914 * Farallon SKYLINE Wireless PC Card for PowerBooks & PC Notebooks <-- NEW! has new LOWER PRICE and NEW DRIVER! Cross-platform 802.11 DSSS LAN connectivity without wires, now for less. Compatible with Apple's AirPort. * Aladdin IntelliNews: THE NEWS YOU NEED, WHEN YOU NEED IT! Now there's no need to bounce from Web site to Web site to find the info you need - IntelliNews does it for you! Check it out now at: --------------------------------------------------------------- MailBITS/07-Feb-00 ------------------ **AirPort 1.1 Takes Off** -- Apple has released AirPort 1.1, a software update that improves user control over AirPort Base Stations and adds a few eagerly awaited features to the company's wireless networking technology. AirPort 1.1 offers more control over a Base Station's built-in modem by adding a modem status indicator and a Connect button (previously, you had to launch an Internet application such as a Web browser or email client to force a connection). The new software now supports using multiple base stations within the same network (which Apple refers to as roaming), and enables you to specify access to computers based on the IDs of their AirPort Cards for greater security. Also, the update includes the capability to set up an AirPort-equipped Mac as a base station without requiring an AirPort Base Station device. AirPort 1.1 is a free 4.3 MB download. [JLC] **Sprechen Sie Deutsch?** Our hard-working translation teams, and particularly the German team, are in need of some new volunteers to help spread the workload and make translating TidBITS issues easier for everyone. If you're interested in translating English into German, French, Japanese, or Dutch and helping promote the Macintosh community in those languages, check out the URLs below for information on what's involved. Help keep TidBITS truly international! And whether or not you're up for becoming a translator, if you enjoy reading one of our translations each week, let the translators know. The translation teams appreciate the kind letters many of you have sent over the years, and your encouragement makes the task of translating each issue all the more worthwhile. Thanks! [ACE] * German * French * Japanese * Dutch **Apple Revises iTools Terms of Service** -- Quietly bowing to public concern over the legalese in the iTools user agreement (first reported in GCSF's MWJ back on 10-Jan-00), Apple has changed the wording to avoid criticisms that the agreement implied that all content posted in public areas of iTools (such as your public iDisk folder or on Web pages created with HomePage) belonged to Apple. The original wording stated: "You hereby grant Apple a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right to exercise all rights, under copyright, publicity and related laws, in any media now known or not currently known, with respect to any content you post in any public site within iTools." The new wording removes much of the legalese and clarifies the license you grant to Apple to allow them to distribute your work. "You hereby grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish any such public area content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the area on which such content is posted. Said license will be in effect only as long as you are an iTools member, and will terminate upon removal of such content from the public area or when you are no longer an iTools member, whichever happens first." Although it's easy to see conspiracy theories in such situations, in our experience, they're more commonly what happens when out-of- touch lawyers draft legal documents without thinking about the ramifications for users or the negative impact of user revolts and damaging press reports. A similar situation erupted last year when Yahoo bought Web hosting service GeoCities and imposed new terms of service that gave Yahoo complete rights to GeoCities-hosted content. After briefly trying to explain the new policy, Yahoo caved and revised the agreement to reserve only those rights necessary to display the GeoCities content. It would have been nice to see Apple learning from Yahoo's mistake before all the fuss, but the end result is copacetic. [ACE] **Poll Preview: Macintosh Ownership** -- In his Macworld Expo keynote last month in San Francisco, Steve Jobs made much of the fact that roughly a quarter of iBook buyers and half of iMac buyers were new to the Mac. (See "Doing the Numbers with Jobs" in TidBITS-514_ for details.) Those numbers are good news for Apple but concentrating on them runs the risk of minimizing the financial impact of Apple's repeat customers. There's no question that Apple must grow the overall user base, but there's more money in repeat customers due to lower customer acquisition costs and because Mac users often buy multiple Macs over the years. If we take the reverse view of Apple's market research, we see that about three quarter of iBook users and half of iMac users (and probably most PowerBook and G4 buyers) are repeat customers. The question, then is how many Macs have you (not your employer) personally purchased your individual use (as opposed to servers or machines for others) at work or at home? Vote now on our home page so we can show the monetary importance of the existing Macintosh community! [ACE] Poll Results: They Come in Colors --------------------------------- by Adam C. Engst With last week's poll - "What program do you most often use to edit or create graphics?" - we knew we couldn't offer all possible responses, so we encouraged people to send notes to TidBITS Talk about what they use. Response to the poll resulted in an extremely interesting set of information, even after I weeded out redundant messages. **The Winners** -- Not surprisingly, the powerful Adobe Photoshop took home the award for most popular among the specific choices we offered in the poll, tallying 40 percent of the vote. Second place was more surprising, with Thorsten Lemke's GraphicConverter picking up 14 percent of the vote. After that, the results were relatively predictable, with Illustrator at around 8 percent, followed by Canvas and FreeHand at 7 percent. AppleWorks (previously known as ClarisWorks), PhotoDeluxe, ImageReady, and Painter all picked up a few votes as well. Surprisingly far down were Corel's offerings, CorelDraw and Photo-Paint, which barely registered at all, although Corel is now making a limited edition package of CorelDraw and Photo-Paint available for free. **The Others** -- In many ways, the messages we received about other programs proved more interesting, since they reminded us of programs we hadn't thought of while designing the poll and revealed numerous users of obsolete programs. We should have added MicroFrontier's image editor Color It and Macromedia's Web graphics-oriented Fireworks to the mix, possibly with MicroFrontier's Enhance (Color It's big brother) and Macromedia's Web-animation tool Flash as well. Color It and Fireworks in particular generated messages from happy users. A few blasts from the past were equally as well represented by reader messages, though, including the obsolete Canvas 3.5 and the long-defunct ClarisDraw (mentioned in TidBITS-187_), SuperPaint (reviewed in TidBITS-112_), and IntelliDraw (reviewed in TidBITS-155_). Canvas 3.5's loyal following didn't surprise me much since with the ill-fated Canvas 5, Deneba started moving away from 3.5's focus on drawing and painting and has tried to turn Canvas into a professional level vector graphics and image-editing tool. You can read for yourself if they're successful in Matt Neuburg's review of Canvas 7 next week; we ran out of space this week. Also telling was the outpouring of support for these older programs, which have either been left to die by their companies or supplanted by newer versions. I turn to ClarisWorks when I need to do basic graphics, mostly because basic graphics are all that are within my reach. Perhaps the less you need, the more likely you are to stick with what you know rather than worry about new features. Other programs that garnered a mention or two include Pierce Software's inexpensive drawing program ShareDraw, the powerful Live Picture vector-based image editing program, the drawing tools built into Microsoft PowerPoint 98, and Nova Development's Print Explosion. **Studio Artist in a Garret** -- One unmentioned program that deserves recognition is Synthetik Software's Studio Artist. I stand no chance of being able to do justice with a description of this program, but I've found it fascinating and like no other program besides perhaps Delta Tao's defunct Monet. Here's how I've used Studio Artist. First, you provide Studio Artist with a source graphic, either a photo, some piece of clip art, or something you sketch. Then you choose a brush style, tell Studio Artist to go into automatic drawing mode, and click a start button. Amazingly, Studio Artist then goes and draws a picture based on your original using the brush style you selected. If you don't like where it's going, you just stop the process, clear the screen, select another style, and start again. For our Christmas cards this year, I sketched the outline of a Christmas tree in ClarisWorks, opened it in Studio Artist, and tried different effects. Once I found one we liked, I placed it on a template in Print Explosion, added some text, and ended up with a reasonable card. To get an idea of what a total neophyte can do with Studio Artist, check out my samples (we ended up using the top left image and adding some color manually with green and red markers, since we don't have a color printer). Studio Artist can do far more than what I've described, including apply these sorts of effects to every frame in a QuickTime movie. Tapping its full power requires a significant learning curve (at least for people who don't already use high-end graphics programs), but if you've always wanted to apply wild effects to images or movies with a minimum of effort, Studio Artist will do the trick. It's not cheap, at $295 for the CD-ROM with electronic manuals or $330 for a box with printed manuals, but there is a free 11.2 MB demo you can download. Email Attachments: Who Does What -------------------------------- by Adam C. Engst The hubbub we caused with last week's "Email Attachment Format Explained" article is only just subsiding - indication, I think, that this topic creates strong feelings. It's frustrating when you think you're doing everything right with sending attachments but still can't get one through. This week I'll try to shed more light on the issue, and I also recommend that you read the threads these topics spawned on TidBITS Talk. **Loose Threads** -- First, let me address some questions generated by last week's article, and then I'll look at how you work with attachment formats in the major Macintosh email clients. Many people seemed confused about AppleDouble, with several asking "Is it a program?" To reiterate, AppleDouble, like AppleSingle, BinHex, Base64, and uuencode, is a file format - a specific organization of related bits. Every file on your hard disk exists in a specific format, whether it be the format created by AppleWorks, Microsoft Word, or StuffIt Deluxe. Some file formats like AppleDouble are handled within other programs almost exclusively, so you're unlikely to see a program devoted to creating and decoding AppleDouble files. Many people recommended Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) as another format that's useful for sending files between platforms. Creating a PDF file is generally as simple as printing; see the TidBITS Talk message linked below for a list of ways to create PDF documents. To read a PDF document, you need Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. One tip that I hadn't realized previously: if you want to copy a chunk of text from more than a single page of a PDF document from within Acrobat Reader, you must first set the Default Page Layout to Continuous in File -> Preferences -> General Preferences. We have no idea what Adobe was thinking when they came up with this interface - who ever heard of modifying the functionality of a ubiquitous command like Copy based on your default page layout? Another popular recommendation for cross-platform file support was the Zip compression and archiving format that's common in the Windows world. Although utilities for creating and expanding Zip archives on the Mac have been around for a long time, they haven't been particularly well known. That should become less of a problem now that Aladdin has released the shareware DropZip 5.5 (bundled with StuffIt Deluxe 5.5), which enables you to create Zip archives. One of the problems with Zip in the Macintosh world is that Zip by default only preserves the data fork of Macintosh files. Aladdin's DropZip 5.5 (as well as Tom Brown's $15 shareware ZipIt utility) can optionally encode Macintosh files with resource forks in the protective binary packaging format MacBinary before compressing, which lets Zip archives contain Macintosh files without fear of data loss. Unfortunately, a Zip archive with MacBinary-encoded files inside isn't necessarily usable in Windows unless the user decodes using Aladdin's free Aladdin Expander. For more details about MacBinary, see "Macintosh Internet File Format Primer" in TidBITS-445_. To simplify the lives of less-experienced recipients, you might include information in the body of the message telling them precisely what you're attaching and the details of any compression and encoding formats you've used. Then, if something goes wrong, they have a chance at figuring out what to do, particularly if you included some boilerplate information about how to decode, expand, and open attached files. Finally, I want to note that although there are lots of "shoulds" when it comes to which attachment formats work, the only absolute answer is the one you can verify for yourself in a particular instance. If there are weird email gateways in between you and your recipient, if either of you are using LAN-based email programs that have not been updated to support true Internet email, or the phase of the moon is wrong, your attachments may come through corrupted. The only solution is to try alternate attachment formats and see what you can make work. **Test It Yourself** -- I spent a bit of time sending messages with attachments to friends who use AOL in an attempt to figure out what AOL does with different attachment formats. After I was done, I realized that with a little work in Eudora, I could set something up for anyone to receive the same tests and see how they worked. With a combination of stationery, filters, and automatic mail checks, I've created a simple auto-reply system using a copy of Eudora Pro running on a Power Mac 7100 here. When Eudora receives a message with a specific subject line, it returns a file using a specific encoding format. For instance, want to see if you can receive an inline GIF encoded with Base64 via your Lotus Notes account at work? Just send the appropriate test message and Eudora will reply. The system checks for new requests every 10 minutes, so it could be 20 minutes or more before you receive a response, depending on traffic. Please use this service only for serious testing, since it's not intended to support extremely high loads. The four attachment formats I've used are AppleDouble, Base64, BinHex, and uuencode. My ten test files are an inline GIF image, an inline JPEG image, a Word document, a PDF document, a SimpleText file, a Macintosh application (a self-extracting archive), a Windows application (an .exe self-extracting archive), a stuffed Word document, a stuffed Macintosh application, and a Zip archive of two Word files. That provides 40 possible combinations, including one (the uuencoded Macintosh application) that is guaranteed to fail. To access these messages, visit the Web page below and click the links for combinations that interest you. The system checks for exact matches in the subject lines to avoid loops and reduce the impact of spammers, so I strongly recommend that you don't try to guess at the appropriate subject lines. Unfortunately, there's no way to reverse the testing and figure out how to receive attachments on the Mac from random other email programs. That you'll have to do on your own. **Looking at Specific Email Programs** -- All that said, here are details on using different encoding formats with each major Macintosh email program. * AOL: There's no way to change how AOL formats attachments, which are sent as Base64 unless a resource fork is present, in which case at least recent versions of the AOL software use AppleDouble. Text files (which includes anything you manually encode with BinHex or uuencode before sending) are sent in the body of the message rather than as an attachment. To decode such files, save the text out to a file, concatenating it carefully if necessary, and then drop the resulting file on StuffIt Expander. More the issue is how AOL receives attachments, a concern that's generally moot with true Internet email programs. For instance, AOL cannot accept multiple attachments in a single message (try compressing multiple files into an archive or sending them separately). If you're sending a file to an AOL user, the best attachment format appears to be Base64, which worked in the most test cases and with the least additional fussing. BinHex and uuencoded documents generally arrived intact, but came in with the .mim extension (for MIME) and were usable only after they were decoded by StuffIt Expander (Mac) or Aladdin Expander (Windows). AppleDouble attachments also usually arrived intact, but with the filename "Unknown." They could be opened manually on the Mac if you chose Open from the File menu in an appropriate program, and in Windows if you added an appropriate filename extension. AOL appears to do some image conversion, so the tests of inline JPEG images worked, but arrived as PNG files. These test were done with AOL 4.0 on both the Mac and Windows; the Windows 5.0 client may have different behaviors. But remember, you never know what version of AOL someone may be using, and the older it is, the more likely you are to have trouble. * Emailer: In Claris Emailer 2.0v3, click the disclosure triangle next to the paper clip in an outgoing message to reveal the attachments pane. An Encoding pop-up menu lets you choose among different formats including: Service default, No encoding, BinHex, Base64, uuencode, AppleSingle, and AppleDouble. The service default option is tricky, since it's necessary for Emailer's compatibility with CompuServe and AOL mail, but if you use it for Internet email, it picks up the encoding from the account settings, which default to BinHex. Emailer also tries to compress attachments automatically; you can disable that feature with a checkbox in the attachments pane. Note that Emailer happily lets you send - without warning - an attachment that requires its resource fork via uuencode or Base64 even though the file will be destroyed in the process. * Eudora: In all versions of Eudora, you set the default attachment format in the Attachments panel of the Settings dialog box. You can override that setting for each individual message using the attachment format pop-up menu in the upper left of an outgoing message window. Turn on balloon help before clicking that menu to see descriptions of each option. Eudora can send attachments using AppleDouble, AppleSingle, BinHex, and uuencode (Eudora Pro only). Eudora can also send in Base64 format as long as the file being sent doesn't require more protection for its resource fork. The easiest way to set Base64 is to choose AppleDouble as the encoding format, and then turn off the "Always include Macintosh info" button, which is the button in the outgoing message window's toolbar, next to the QP button. Turn on balloon help and point at it for more information. * Green 1.0b8.1: In Green, you set the attachment format in the Send tab of the Preferences dialog. You can choose among AppleDouble, Base64, and BinHex. Green is up front about Base64 sending only the data fork, but you can't change the encoding format for individual messages. * Mailsmith: In Mailsmith, you set the default attachment format in the Preferences dialog, and you can override those settings on a per-attachment basis in the Enclosures tab of the outgoing message you're composing. Mailsmith supports AppleDouble, AppleSingle, Base64, BinHex, and uuencode and can compress attachments automatically with StuffIt (you can override that compression on a per-attachment basis). * Mulberry: Mulberry offers the standard formats, AppleDouble, AppleSingle, Base64, BinHex, and uuencode, and lets you set a default within the Attachment panel of the Preferences dialog, plus override that setting on either a per-message or per- attachment basis. Mulberry can also automatically switch formats to override the default setting (which is Base64 initially) when the attachment contains a resource fork that would otherwise be lost. Interestingly, Mulberry (and some other email programs) finds this information from the Advanced Options of an entry in File Mappings section of the Internet control panel. * Musashi: In the Account tab in Musashi's Preferences dialog, you can choose from "Base64 [AppleDouble]," Base64 [AppleSingle]," "Base64 [Data Fork]," BinHex, and uuencode. You can switch formats on a per-message basis in the Options tab within each outgoing message window. Musashi appears to be the only email program that explicitly says that the AppleDouble and AppleSingle binary packaging formats also use the Base64 transfer encoding format. (See the article "Macintosh Internet Format Primer" in TidBITS-445_ for details on the distinction.) * Netscape Communicator 4.7: You don't have many options with Netscape Communicator; the only control over attachment format is in the third tab down in an outgoing message window. A checkbox labeled "Use uuencode instead of MIME for attachments" lets you toggle between uuencode and something Netscape is calling MIME. In this case, and based on some posts I've seen from Netscape employees, I suspect they're checking the attachment itself to see if it has a resource fork and using AppleDouble plus Base64 if it does, and just Base64 if it doesn't. Netscape loses points for failing to mention anything regarding attachment formats in the online help. * Outlook Express 5.0: Like Emailer, click the Attachments disclosure triangle in an outgoing message to reveal the attachments pane. You can change the attachment format by clicking the text describing the attachment (it's one of Outlook Express's funny pop-up pseudo-dialog boxes) and then clicking the radio button corresponding to the format you want. Outlook Express 5.0 supports AppleDouble, BinHex, Base64, and uuencode. It can also compress attachments automatically, add Windows extensions to filenames, and optionally not send attachments to people in the Cc and Bcc lines. Outlook Express 5.0 also gets points for clear wording, since its options are labelled with plain English recommendations first, and format names second, as in "Any computer (AppleDouble)," "Macintosh (BinHex)," "Windows (MIME/Base64)," and "UNIX (uuencode)." And, if you attempt to send a file with a resource fork using Base64 or uuencode, Outlook Express warns you that it may be damaged. * PowerMail 2.4v7: CTM Development's PowerMail supports AppleDouble, BinHex, Base64, and uuencode, and lets you set a default in the Encoding screen of the Preferences dialog, plus change the format on a per-message basis within outgoing message windows. * QuickMail Pro 2.0: Of the email programs mentioned here, QuickMail Pro 2.0 offers the most flexibility in dealing with attachment formats, plus it is the only program to differentiate between binary packaging (called File Format in the Edit Mail Encoding preferences dialog box) and transfer encoding (called Byte Encoding). You can choose among Data Only, AppleDouble, AppleSingle, and BinHex for binary packaging, and separately choose 8-bit (no encoding), Base64, or uuencode for transfer encoding. With these choices, you can create custom encoding settings, so you could define AppleDouble and Base64 as the encoding to use for "Modern Windows" and Data Only plus uuencode for "Old Windows," and so on. That's not all: within QuickMail Pro's address book, you can specify which of your custom encoding settings to use for each person, and if you're sending mail to people who aren't in your address book, you can change the encoding for each recipient of a message. Although this level of flexibility may seem like overkill, it's welcome as long as we have to cope with all of these formats. **Sending It Off** -- As much as my head is reeling with all the details I've tried to bring together here, there are bound to be situations that defy logical explanation and everything you try. In those cases, remember that it's generally not your fault, if you're using one of the programs above, and the best course may simply be to encourage your recipient to try reading mail using a modern Internet email program using a true ISP rather than AOL or some standards-flouting LAN-based email package. $$ Non-profit, non-commercial publications may reprint articles if full credit is given. Others please contact us. We don't guarantee accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. This file is formatted as setext. For more information send email to . A file will be returned shortly. For information: how to subscribe, where to find back issues, and more, email . TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017. Send comments and editorial submissions to: Back issues available at: And: Full text searching available at: -------------------------------------------------------------------