E-MAIL FEATURES

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Now a day, the mail client comes with enhanced features such as attachment, address book, and
MIME support. Here in this chapter we will discuss all of these features which will give you a better
understanding of added feature of a mail client program.

Attachment
Ability to attach files along with the message is one of the most useful features of email. The
attachment may be a word document, PowerPoint presentation, audio/video files, or
images.

In order to attach files to an email, click the attach button. As a result, a dialog box appears
asking for specifying the name and location of the file you want to attach.

Once you have selected the appropriate file, it is attached to the mail.

Usually a paper clip icon appears in the email which indicates that it has an attachment.

When adding an attachment it is better to compress the attached files so as to reduce the file
size and save transmission time as sending and downloading large files consumes a lot of
space and time.

Address Book
Address book feature of a mail program allows the users to store information about the people
whom they communicate regularly by sending emails. Here are some of the key features of an
Address book:

Address book includes the nick names, email addresses, phone number etc. of the people.

Using address book allows us not to memorize email of address of a person, you just have to
select recipient name from the list.

When you select a particular name from the list, the corresponding email address link
automatically get inserted in to the To: field.

Address book also allows creating a group so that you can send a email to very member of
the group at once instead of giving each person email address one by one.

MIME Types
MIME is acronym of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME compliant mailer allows us to
send files other than simple text i.e. It allows us to send audio, video, images, document, and pdf
files as an attachment to an email.

Suppose if you want to send a word processor document that has a group of tabular columns with
complex formatting. If we transfer the file as text, all the formatting may be lost. MIME compliant
mailer takes care of messy details and the message arrives as desired.

The following table describes commonly used MIME Types:

1. Type Subtype Description File extensions

2. Application postscript Printable postscript document .eps, .ps

tex TEX document .tex
troff Printable troff document .t, .tr, .roff

3. Audio aiff Apple sound .aif, .aiff,.aifc

au Sun Microsystems sound .au, .snd
midi Musical Instrument Digital Interface .midi, .mid
real audio Progressive Network sound .ra, .ram
 4. image gif Graphics Interchange Format .gif
jpeg Joint Photographic Experts Group .jpeg, .jpg, .jpe
png Portable Network Graphics .png
triff Tagged Image Modeling Language .tiff, .tif

5. Model vrml Virual reality Modelling Language .wrl

6. Text html Hyper Text Markup Language .html, .htm

plain Unformatted text .txt
sgml Standard Generalized Markup language .sgml

7. Video avi Microsoft Audio Video Interleaved .avi

mpeg Moving Pictures Expert Group .mpeg, .mpg
quicktime Apple QuickTime movie .qt, .mov
sgi-movie silicon graphic movie .movie

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