On behalf of Bellcore, I am happy to announce the availability of version 2.7 of the "metamail" software to the email community. This package, which is available free of charge for unlimited use by anyone for any purpose, is offered in the hope of making multimedia mail (using the MIME standard) more widespread. OVERVIEW The basic idea of "multimedia" electronic mail is to extend email as we now know it to include many other types of data beyond plain English text. In particular, there is no reason, in principle, why email should not include text in any of the world's languages and character sets, nor why email should not include pictures, sounds, animations, active spreadsheets, or any other kind of data that can be stored on a computer. In recent years, various research systems and even some commercial products have extended email to include some or all of these capabilities. Until recently, however, none of them worked together, and all of them required whole communities of users to abandon their old tools en masse in favor of the new tools of a single software vendor. Recent developments have the promise of changing all of that. There is a new proposed standard for the format of multimedia mail, which would make software from different vendors able to work together smoothly with multimedia mail, as they do now with plain text mail. The software being announced here implements that proposed standard, but takes it a step further by incorporating it into the existing tools with which people read mail today, allowing multimedia mail to be adopted in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary fashion. DETAILS Metamail is a package that can be used to convert virtually ANY mail-reading program (on UNIX, DOS, or Commorodore Amiga) into a multimedia mail-reading program. It is an extermely generic implementation of MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), the proposed standard for multimedia mail formats on the Internet. The implementation is extremely flexible and extensible, using a "mailcap" file mechanism for adding support for new data formats when sent through the mail. At a heterogeneous site where many mail readers are in use, the mailcap mechanism can be used to extend them all to support new types of multimedia mail by a single addition to a mailcap file. The core of the package is a mechanism that allows the easy configuration of mail readers to call external "viewers" for different types of mail. However, beyond this core mechanism, the distribution includes viewers for a number of mail types defined by the MIME standard, so that it is useful immediately and without any special site-specific customization or extension. Types with built-in support in the metamail distribution include: 1. Plain US ASCII (i.e., English) text, of course. 2. Plain text in the ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew/English) character set. 3. Richtext (multifont formatted text, termcap-oriented viewer) 4. Image formats (using the xloadimage program under X11) 5. Audio (initial "viewer" for SPARCstations) 6. Multipart mail, combining several other types 7. Multipart/alternative mail, offering data in multiple formats. 8. Encapsulated messages 9. Partial & external messages (for large data objects) 10. Arbitrary (untyped) binary data Other media types and character sets may be easily supported with the mailcap mechanism, using the provided types as examples/templates. The metamail software also provides rudimentary support for the use of non-ASCII characters in certain mail headers, as described by a companion document to the proposed MIME standard. The metamail distribution comes complete with a small patch for each of over a dozen popular mail reading programs, including Berkeley mail, mh, Elm, Xmh, Xmail, Mailtool, Emacs Rmail, Emacs VM, Andrew, and others. Crafting a patch for additional mail readers is relatively straightforward. In order to build the metamail software, a single "make" command followed by a relatively short compilation will suffice. Patching your mail reader is somewhat harder, but can usually be accomplished in less than an hour if you have the sources at hand. The experience of most users is that the metamail package can easily be used to get multimedia mail working with your existing mail readers in less than half a day. AVAILABILITY To retrieve the file, use anonymous ftp to the machine thumper.bellcore.com (Internet address 128.96.41.1). Type "cd pub/nsb". In that directory, you will find: 1. mm2.7.tar.Z -- this is a compressed tar file containing the core metamail distribution. Uncompress it, untar it, and read the top-level "README" file for further instructions. Strictly speaking, this is the only thing you really need to retrieve. Note that the "2.7" will change in future releases. 2. contrib2.7.tar.Z -- another compressed tar file, this one containing lots of useful MIME and metamail-related utilities contributed by metamail users, including software for building multimedia mail-based services, and MIME- related utilities for Emacs, Tk, SGI, Mac, DOS, Amiga, and more. Binaries for DOS are also included. Note that the "2.7" will change in future releases. 3. A subdirectory called "samples". Except for the README file, each file in this directory (except the one named ".MS_MsgDir", which should be ignored) is a sample MIME-format message, which can be used to test your metamail installation. There is also now a compressed tar file of this directory, called "samples.tar.Z". The distribution is mirrored in Europe in the directory mail/metamail on the machine src.doc.ic.ac.uk, and on ftp.funet.fi in /pub/unix/mail/metamail. If you do not have ftp access to any of these machines, but desire a copy of the metamail distribution, send mail to "mailserver@thumper.bellcore.com" with a subject line of "autosend: metamail-sources-uu" for a uuencoded compressed tar file containing the complete metamail distribution. Once you have MIME software installed, you can download anything from the thumper ftp server by sending mail to "mail-server@thumper.bellcore.com" (note the "-" in this address, unlike the previous one) with a subject that is the name of the file you want to download, such as "pub/nsb/contrib2.7.tar.Z" Metamail and MIME are discussed on the newsgroup "comp.mail.mime". If you cannot read news, the same information is available as the mailing list is INFO-MIME@thumper.bellcore.com. Requests to join the list should be directed to INFO-MIME-REQUEST@thumper.bellcore.com. If you do not wish to join the mailing list or read the newsgroup, but you DO want to know about future releases of metamail, please send mail indicating this interest to nsb@bellcore.com. Please feel free to recirculate this announcement as widely as possible. -- Nathaniel S. Borenstein Member of Technical Staff, Bellcore