From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

When I try to send an EMail to AOL that includes an inline photo, the
AOL account receives the message, but without the picture!

On AOL, the mail controls are to receive all mail including pictures.

On the Mac, I'm using Apple Mail and the result is the same no matter if
I send from my mac.com, earthlink.net, or optonline.net mail accounts.

Anyone seen this problem and have a solution? TIA!
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Win32 NewsLink 1.113

From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

Mike O'Connor <mike@leptonicsystems.com> wrote:

When I try to send an EMail to AOL that includes an inline photo, the
AOL account receives the message, but without the picture!

On AOL, the mail controls are to receive all mail including pictures.

On the Mac, I'm using Apple Mail and the result is the same no matter if
I send from my mac.com, earthlink.net, or optonline.net mail accounts.

Anyone seen this problem and have a solution? TIA!

We recently had that same problem. Our solution was to send an archive
file as an attachment. In our case, the recipient was a Windoze user, so
we used DropZip. Seems like a strange and unnecessary step, but the aol
user got his pictures.

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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003 22:33:50 -0700, schram@webenet.net (Chris Schram)
wrote:

Mike O'Connor <mike@leptonicsystems.com> wrote:

When I try to send an EMail to AOL that includes an inline photo, the
AOL account receives the message, but without the picture!

On AOL, the mail controls are to receive all mail including pictures.

On the Mac, I'm using Apple Mail and the result is the same no matter if
I send from my mac.com, earthlink.net, or optonline.net mail accounts.

Anyone seen this problem and have a solution? TIA!

We recently had that same problem. Our solution was to send an archive
file as an attachment. In our case, the recipient was a Windoze user, so
we used DropZip. Seems like a strange and unnecessary step, but the aol
user got his pictures.

I send lots of attachments to AOL users (part of my job in the
printing company I work for is email proofs) and I found long ago to
either zip them up or stuff them (Mac) - otherwise AOL is "flaky"...
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Win32 NewsLink 1.113

From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

When I try to send an EMail to AOL that includes an inline photo, the
AOL account receives the message, but without the picture!

Yep. This is because of a combination of Mail's attachment encoding and AOL's brain-damaged handling of MIME attachments.

When you send a file, inline or as an attachment, the file must be "encoded" to pass through email servers. Encoding makes the attachment look like text, which is the only thing an email server can handle.

Macintosh files have two "parts," which are called a "data fork" and a "resource fork." Other computers do not use two-part files, so the encoding standards were not written with two-part files in mind.

When you attach a file with Mail, it uses something called "AppleDouble" encoding. AppleDouble works by:

1. Breaking the file into TWO attachments, one for the data fork and one for the resource fork;
2. Doing MIME/base64 encoding on both attachments; and
3. Sending both attachments.

Here is where it gets tricky:

AOL's email software is badly written. (Yes, I am an AOL user, and it's badly written anyway.) AOL email software can not accept an email that contains more than one attachment. AOL's email software sees an AppleDouble attachment, thinks that it is two attachments, and will not decode it.

In order to get the picture, an AOL user must do these steps:

1. Download the entire email message with the File->Save command.
2. Run a MIME decoder (Stuffit Expander will work) on the downloaded message. This will cause the picture to appear as a file.
3. Open the picture in an image-viewing program.


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