You need to UPload the file to your Alpha host disc. Then it must be attached to a message in your Alpha mailbox from where it is sent to your colleague's mailbox. This leg of the trip is sort of "sideways". Your colleague finds the file in his mailbox, shortly after you sent it, as an attachment to a message.
Your colleague may be able to view or print the file (if it's a text / ASCII file), reply to you, delete it in his mailbox.
Alternately, your colleague may wish to or have to DOWNload the file to his computer, perhaps to keep it, or perhaps because the file is a binary file and therefore cannot be viewed or printed online. So the file must be detached from the message and moved from the mailbox to the colleague's Alpha host disc from where it can be downloaded to his computer.
Different mailers use different formats. Different people use different computers and/or word processors. Even our friends may be incompatible.
What do we do now? We use the telephone to make our later electronic communications as painless as possible.
For an ASCII text file, we use a common font such as Times Roman or Courier. And we open the file in a text editor, such as Windows Notepad or Wordpad or DOS Edit, to make sure that we didn't embed any control characters by accident when we prepared the file in a different word processor and then Saved it as Text.
For a formatted text file, we need to use a common keyboard and a common font if we transfer between different platforms (e.g., Mac and IBM compatible). We need to embed a special font, if possible, if it is essential for the language or the look of the document and the recipient doesn't have that font. We need to make sure that the same version of the same word processor is used on both ends; if not, save the file in an earlier version of a word processor--for example: a WordPerfect v. 5.1 file can be saved and read by WP 6 and by MS Word 6. Or we can Save the file As a Rich Text Format file, with the extension .rtf, which can be read by any decent word processor on any platform.
For images and sound files, we need to use a common format usable at both ends.
Finally, but importantly, we compare mailers. If MIME is used at each end, no problem: this is a multi-purpose encoding scheme for electronic files which (more or less) ensures that files are readable on all platforms. The mailer Pine uses MIME, and it is available at Lehman for people with Alpha and Unix accounts. So, if you use Pine to send a file of any type, and your recipient has an account on the Alpha or the Unix, or has a different MIME-capable mailer, all is well.
But the Vax is not MIME-capable. So you cannot send a file from the Alpha to Vax as an e-mail attachment. You have to use a different Alpha mailer.
As the Vax is not MIME-capable, you can use it to send a text file without a problem. To send a binary file from the Vax, you first must convert it to an ascii file: the most common converter for this purpose is uuencode, it's downloadable freeware. The recipient of your file must use uudecode to reconvert the file you send to binary; be sure to make that clear.
If you use the DOS version, at the DOS prompt, enter uuencode <path:\filename.ext>. The new file is called <filename>.uue and is now a text file. You can upload it and send it to someone who does not have MIME.
The recipient downloads the file and, at the DOS prompt, enters uudecode <filename>.uue. He now has a copy of the original binary file. If you zipped the file, he must still unzip it before the file is usable.
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