🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4337@novavax.UUCP> mitch@novavax.UUCP (Mitch Silverman) writes:
>
>First of all, what is NeXTMail?  I presume it's reg'lar email with
>sound annotations, correct?  If so, do the annotations conform to
>MIME standards, or, more to the point, was the MIME standard 
>written to allow for NeXTMail transmission?
>

NeXTmail is the NeXT multimedia-mail application. It allows drag and drop
transmission of sound, pictures, files, and rich text. The MIME standard
and NeXTmail seem to have been written independently.

>Second, does software exist for the Mac to generate and output
>(i.e. record and transmit, and receive and playback--usefully)
>NeXTMail on the Mac?  Is such software in the works?  Will it
>(I hope) work with Apple's Communication Tool Box (thereby 
>allowing its use via serial dialup and terminal emulation,
>not merely via TCP/IP--which I do not have.)
>

No, there's not any software currently available that allows the use of
NeXTmail on the Mac. It would be nice if there was. If someone is 
developing NeXTmail for the Mac, I'd love to have it.

Hopefully someone will develop a service to convert NeXTmail to MIME
and vice versa. Or register the NeXTmail formats as MIME formats (if
that'll work).

Terry Wilcox

Excerpts from internet.mmm-people: 28-Dec-92 NeXTMail on the Mac Mitch
Silverman@ucbvax.B (1115)

>  If so, do the annotations conform to
> MIME standards, or, more to the point, was the MIME standard 
> written to allow for NeXTMail transmission?

One of the ways we achieved consensus in defining MIME was by making
sure that we weren't standardizing on any existing format for which some
vendor would have a substantial advantage.  Thus MIME is not NeXTMail. 
However, it is not really very hard to take an existing multimedia mail
program and retrofit it to read and write MIME instead of its native
format -- I did it, for example, with the latest version of Andrew.

You could also, in theory, encapsulate an entire Nextmail message by
defining a MIME type for it (e.g. application/nextmail) but that would
be a poor solution, in my view, because it wouldn't interoperate well. 
Much better would be for future versions of Nextmail software to
understand both its own format and MIME, and to generate whichever the
user prefers.  -- Nathaniel

wilcoxt@cuug.ab.ca (Terrance Wilcox 229-3361) writes:
|Hopefully someone will develop a service to convert NeXTmail to MIME

Done.  ftp it from nexus.yorku.ca, in pub/n2m.1.3.shar[.Z]

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@CCS.YorkU.CA | lethe!dave
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | York Postmaster and
CANADA. 416-223-8968  | occasional sendfail(8) consultant.