Many e-mail applications provide an automated way of attaching documents or applications to e-mail messages. Eudora Pro, for example, lets you attach files by choosing a menu option, and also supports MAPI (Mail Application Programming Interface), which allows you to send documents from other applications in the form of a mail message. It works very like printing.
Eudora Light (don't you love it when people spell Light properly? There's a literary tradition to Eudora -- the name comes from Eudora Welty, a fine chronicler of life in the South of the USA, who wrote a very funny short story called Why I live at the PO) doesn't provide these features.
However, you can add attachments to any e-mail by encoding the binary file as text. There are a variety of encoding schemes, including BinHex, Base64 and UUE. Perhaps the most commonly used is UUE (uu-encoding). The main thing is to make sure the recipient can decode it. This is reasonably assured if you communicate the encoding format. It helps to use the same coding/encoding package. There's a very good freeware one called Wincode, available from shareware sites. Try ftp://ftp.tas.gov.au/pub/simtelnet/win3/diskfile/wncod266.zip or any SimTel mirror in the win3/encode directory. I'll put a link on our Web page at www.idg.com.au/pc.world
To encode a document using Wincode, you just click the encode button, browse for the file, and specify the type of encoding. Wincode can automatically zip first to reduce the size that has to be encoded. The result is sent to the clipboard or to a file. Then you just paste the result into your e-mail. If there's a limit on the length of e-mail you can create, you may have to break the text into parts and send it in several e-mails. Wincode can do this automatically, creating several files all under a specified length, say 64K. Your recipient has to reassemble the file, and decode it with Wincode or another package. This is not exactly wieldy, but it works.
- Neale Morison