Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / December 2007

Perhaps and I can see the advantages of how this is being handled
currently.

What got me thinking about this issue, is how different email clients
seem to handle replies.

I often get replies that not only include my entire, original message,
but also all the attachments, which is rather annoying.

Other times the attachments are omitted as I would expect.

This lead me to assume, that there might be a way to somehow prioritise,
who to send attachments to in the first place. I certainly would
appreciate, if there was a setting somewhere.

Does that make sense?

For the OP: An easy way to do that in Eudora is to send the email, with
attachment, to the "To" recipient.  After it has gone, select the
message and choose "Send Again" from the Message menu. Drag the
attachment to the trash, then change the address to include all those
who should receive a cc without the attachment.

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:28:57:

Martin S:

Bill Cole:

Just to elaborate, the basic protocol (SMTP) for sending internet mail
was developed even before attachments existed; in that protocol,
the client first tells the SMTP server the addresses of every
individual recipient -- not via "headers," but by sending one
command per address, making no distiction whatsoever
between what you think of as "To:" vs. "Cc:" vs. "Bcc:"

To the SMTP server, there is only one "class" of recipient
(very democratic, eh?) -- this also explains how "Bcc:" works,
in that it is simply those recipients who are never mentioned
in the headers, anyway; in fact, none of the headers
which you may fill in when composing is required at all.

Once all that is completed, the client then appends the "message,"
including all of what you think of as "headers," but which
does not need to be interpreted by the SMTP server
(servers may pay slight attention, perhaps supplying
a "Message-ID:" header if the client did not, for example).

Other than inserting its own "Postmark" (a "Received:" header)
in front of that entire "data" stream, the SMTP server otherwise
simply passes this uninteresting "data" along, in exactly the same way,
to the next appropriate server enroute, until it finally reaches
a server which "knows" a recipient,
which holds it for pickup via POP or IMAP,
much the same way a postal letter is handled,
enroute to a final P.O. Box for customer pickup.

The notion of "attachments" was developed simply by inventing
a header which defines a "boundary string" that the final recipient
will interpret upon receipt as separating sections of the message body,
with each section containing its own header(s) that describe itself.

Although snoopy "mail screeners" may dig into this and inspect more closely,
to sniff out spam and malware, for example, this is not the SMTP server's
basic job -- it just packs mail going to the same next place into bags,
and doesn't much care about what's inside each letter (or package).

This is the standard system which all email clients (and servers)
must adhere to, in order to participate in a global system.

So long as the entire content of a message is to be delivered
identically to all recipients, it can be transmitted just once
to the SMTP server, preceded by a list of all addresses;
otherwise it needs to be transmitted again, separately,
if even one word (or attachment) is to be varied.

Email clients used by spammers nowadays do just that,
to insert "Dear username@someplace" or random texts,
hoping to defeat spam scanners looking for identical messages,
and to avoid suspicion by one message being addressed to many recipients,
but personal email clients are already confusing enough to their users,
and probably don't want to become any more complex.

In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the handwritten Christmas card
I just received from "The Edwards Family" (one of whom
is running for U.S. President, and currently focusing on our state)
may actually not have been written just for me,
particularly since so many other people have shown me their identical card :)

--

I think the OP would like (as would I) *Eudora* to send different
messages, transparently. I could imagine an acc: line for those in "cc:"
whom you would like the attachment to go to (i.e. as well as to the To:
recipients).

I view it as the user-agent's business to organise that.

Clearly this cannot be done with existing Eudora but it's a feature we
should be pushing for in user-agents.