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E-MAIL
Electronic mail, or e-mail, allows computer users locally
and worldwide to exchange messages. Each user of e-mail has
a mailbox address to which messages are sent. Messages sent
through e-mail can arrive within a matter of seconds.
A
powerful aspect of e-mail is the option to send electronic
files to a person's e-mail address. Non-ASCII files, known
as binary files, may be attached to e-mail messages. These
files are referred to as MIME attachments. MIME stands for
Multimedia Internet Mail Extension, and was developed to
help e-mail software handle a variety of file types. For
example, a document created in Microsoft Word can be
attached to an e-mail message and retrieved by the recipient
with the appropriate e-mail program. Many e-mail programs,
including Eudora, Netscape Messenger, and Microsoft Outlook,
offer the ability to read files written in HTML, which is
itself a MIME type.
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