Re: E-Mail question... -- RPG400-L

On Tue, 15 May 2001 dmosley@dancik.com wrote:

> Would anyone know the hex-values for several of these characters that I
> need, when I'm creating e-mail via AS400.
> 
> I know the EOR (End-of-Row) which is like carriage-return is x'0D25'
> 
> But, I need the following values :
> How would I ...
>      - Start characters to be bold-faced.
>      - and then turn off the bold-face.
>      - Also, how would I start and end underlines?

There are no special control or escape sequences that allow things like
bold and underlining.   In fact, according to RFC-822 (the internet E-mail
standard) ONLY plain text characters are legal, no control characters are
allowed at ALL, except the carriage return / linefeed pair used to denote
the end of a line.

In fact, in order to attach files to your E-mail, the files have to go
through a special process call "base 64 encoding" that translates all the
bits in the attachment to invariant characters, safe for mail transport.
 
A common solution to your problem, as others have mentioned, is to use
HTML encoding in your messages -- but this leads to another problem -- 
many people dislike HTML in their E-mail -- and some will even ignore
any mail that comes up as HTML (in fact, I do that).

Therefore, I submit that the "best of both worlds" scenario is what's
called the "multipart/alternative" format.   In this scenario, you 
send the E-mail in both HTML and plaintext format.   When the user prefers
plaintext, or the mail client can't display html, it uses the plain
text version -- otherwise it uses HTML.   

The reason I didn't reply to this earlier is that I'm not familiar with
using the OS/400 APIs to create/send mail.   I've always weitten my own
tools to do this sort of thing (which, with hindsight, may have been a
mistake)

But...  the format of the message should look something like this:


- - - - - Begin Example - - - - -

from: dmosley@dancik.com
to: Scott Klement <klemscot@klements.com>
date: Wed 16 May 2001  10:32:00 -0500 (CDT)
subject: silly messages
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
    boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0001"

This is a multipart message in MIME format.  If you're reading
this, your mail client doesn't understand MIME messages.

------=_NextPart_000_0001
Content-Type: text/plain

This is the plain-text version of the E-mail Message.  

------=_NextPart_000_0001
Content-Type: text/html

<HTML><HEAD><META equiv=Content-Type content=text/html></HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF>
This is the <B>HTML</B> version of the <U>E-mail Message.</U>
</BODY></HTML>

------=_NextPart_000_0001--

- - - - - End Example - - - - -

Obviously, explaining everything involved in doing E-mail formatting and
explaining how internet mail works is way beyond the scope of this
message.  There's just a GREAT DEAL to explain :)

I'd suggest that take a look at the various RFC's at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/  In particular, look at the RFC's related
to mail formatting, and MIME.

Good Luck!


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