Echelon 1.12
copyright 1993, 1994, Doug Boyce
254 Lasalle Ave
Buffalo, NY 14215
Voice: 716 837.4405
Email: ak272@freenet.acsu.buffalo.edu (NeXTmail or MIME)

This is to announce the phase one availibility of Echelon, a MIME compliant
graphical mail program (UA) for NEXTSTEP written by Douglas Boyce.

Accompanying this is a MAB compiled with 3.1 on Intel. Demo license are available 3 days for
individuals (longer for corporate evaluation).  Consult the ordering file for pricing and
order procedures. If you don't have ftp access or would like more information contact the  
author via telephone, email, or regular mail.

What is MIME
   MIME or (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extentions defined in RFC1521) is the 
   Internet version of NeXTmail that extendes its capability to allow enriched 
   text with non US-ASCII character sets, video, images, audio, and very large
   messages to sent over 7bit links. It does this without depending on standard 
   UNIX programs or encodings.

Capabilities of Echelon

NeXTmail
   Echelon can decode, display, and compose NeXTmail.

MIME
   Echelon understands the following MIME content/subtype pairs
   
   Type		Subtype			Note
   ----		-------			----
   text		plain			
   		richtext
		enriched		

    ** US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 are fully supported. 
       ISO-8859-2 is paritially supported (all characters not found in the
       NEXTSTEP encoding are substituted with the plain Latin character, i.e.
       Zcaron will be replaced with 'Z')
       
    multipart	mixed
    		alternative		Currently the user must choose
					which alternate type to viewed.
					Some type of heuristic approach
					is forthcoming.
		digest
		parallel		Treated as multipart/mixed
		header-set		Treated as multipart/mixed
		
    message	rfc822
    		partial			Reassembles the fragmented messages
					iff the mailbox isn't readonly
    
    ** message/external-body support is forthcoming
    
    application octet-stream		Regarding graphic files: If your system
    					can render the named file 'ball.rle'
					because you have filters installed, and
					you also have set the 'render graphics'
					preferences, It will be rendered as if
					it were image/x-rle.
    		postscript		Placed in a '.ps' file to be rendered
					by Preview.
		rtf			Placed in a '.rtf' file.
		zip			Placed in a '.zip' file. It is assumed
					that the user has already retrieved a 
					program with the capabilities of 
					Opener 3.1 so the user can double click
					to extract.
    image	jpeg
    		gif
		tiff

    ** There are a number of MIME composers that produce illegal image subtypes
       such as image/pgm as opposed to image/x-pgm. However, if the appropriate
       filtering service is installed (i.e. ImageViewer) it can be rendered

    audio	basic			Relys on Sound.app to play 8000 hertz
    					mono sounds.

    video	mpeg			Placed in a '.mpg' file. The author
    					used MPEGPlay 2.3 to display mpeg's.



Echelon is filter-friendly.
   Echelon supports changing the check-for-newmail from the spool mailfile to
   local files. This allows it to coexist with publicly available filtering 
   packages such as procmail. It also uses the appropriate lockfile which the 
   user must set.
   
Echelon also support Berkeley flat file mailboxes
   The caveat is that currently all berkeley mailboxes you wish to use must be
   in the same directory (i.e. $(HOME)/Mail).
   

NeXTmail, and NEXTSTEP are trademarks of NeXT, Inc.
ImageViewer is a copyright of Lennart Lovstrand
MPEGPlay written and/or improved by Brian Wilougby and William A. Rozzi
Opener 3.1 written by Michael Hawley, copyright MIT Media Laboratory Aug 1993