MS-Mail to Dec All-in-1 Mime messages

[ca89]

Dear All,
I am new to this workgroup and need some help with Mime messages
being sent from MS-Mail to Dec All-in-1. I am sending a mail message with
a wordperfect document as a mime encoded attachment. At the SMTP gateway,
a file - Winmail.dat is appearing as an extra attachment within the
message. The questions are :-

1) What does winmail.dat do

2) How do I safely remove it from the mail before it goes to
All-in-1

3) Also, could you give me an address for a basic user guide to
MIME. Simpler than the FAQs, please.

James

[Ned Freed]

> I am new to this workgroup and need some help with Mime messages
> being sent from MS-Mail to Dec All-in-1. I am sending a mail message with
> a wordperfect document as a mime encoded attachment. At the SMTP gateway,
> a file - Winmail.dat is appearing as an extra attachment within the
> message. The questions are :-

> 1) What does winmail.dat do

WINMAIL.DAT is special attachment Microsoft Mail uses to describe messages.
It includes part positioning information as well as some other stuff. I believe
that its in OLE format but I'm not 100% sure about that.

> 2) How do I safely remove it from the mail before it goes to
> All-in-1

This cannot be done safely. WINMAIL.DAT is trash for anything other than
Microsoft Mail, but if the message ever gets back into Microsoft Mail (either
by forwarding or by using a Microsoft Mail client on top of ALL-IN-1, both
of which occur in practice) the WINMAIL.DAT material is needed to get the
message to display propoerly. In particular, the ordering of attachments
gets screwed up if this attachment is removed.

> 3) Also, could you give me an address for a basic user guide to
> MIME. Simpler than the FAQs, please.

Marshall Rose's _The Internet Message_ covers the basics of MIME fairly well in
my opinion. You should also get a copy of the actual MIME specification:
RFC1521 and RFC1522.

Ned