How to send attachments as "non-attachments"

attachments cannot go through Internet
Microsoft Office files are programs
what can you do

Binary file cannot go through the Internet, it is a wrong kind of wine!

There is a certain confusion in understanding what are the objects a simple computer user is creating and manipulating. Technically, all of them are called files. Yet, Microsoft introduced a new concept of document to create this confusion. This is quite a wrongful concept because the word document in Latin means "official paper", and in English, primarily, "an original or official paper relied on as the basis, proof, or support of something". Very few materials created by computer user satisfy these definitions. One of these few, closest to the correct definition of document, should be created as the Acrobat PDF file. NIH, HCFA are doing it for a very long time.

What Microsoft actually had in mind is that the products of word processing applications such as WordPerfect or MSWord are quite different from the products of the applications that have been normally used in the computer world before the millions of uneducated users started hitting the keyboards. The difference between these two is very much like the difference in the classification of alcohol drinks that is accepted in a country I know well. In that country, there are only two kinds of alcohol beverages

• white wine, which is vodka, moonshine or pure alcohol, and
• red wine, which is all the rest.

The documents, in the understanding of Microsoft, are this kind of the red wine.

In actuality, everything a simple user is dealing with on a computer, is called files. And the files truly are of two kinds, like those anecdotal wines. There may be text files (like the white wine) and the binary files (all the rest, like the red wine).

Like in the white wine of the above classification, there may be only the strong alcohol content, the text files may contain only the simplest characters: the 26 + 26 Latin letters (upper and lower case) and the punctuation signs.

If there is more flavor in a file (like in a good Cabernet Sauvignon), for a computer it turns out to be the red wine, or a binary file. This flavor in a file may be created by bolding or italicizing some words, adding bullets, colors, etc.

Naturally, modern word processors can create quite flavorable files that cannot be stored as text files. Microsoft misnamed these binary files as "documents".

Although the Internet was designed by Americans, it cannot tolerate binary files like a regular denizen of the country I know well cannot take the "red wines". This ordinary guy will heavily lace a "red wine" with his "white wine" before he likes it. In the same way, the Internet must convert a binary file into a text file, and only then this file will be able to travel in the network. This is a major problem in the email communications of today.

Summing up: a binary file cannot go through the Internet (email) unless it has been converted into a text file. Different email programs treat converted binary files differently, many Internet nodes on the communication path, in their turn, may apply additional conversions to files they suspect might be corrupted if continued to be sent as text files. All this leads to more confusion and corruption of data.

Microsoft Office files are programs!

To make things even worse, Microsoft imbeds into the bodies of its Office files (MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint) pieces of programming code, turning the texts a user creates into computer programs. The bad guys immediately understood that they may infect these files with viruses and release a dozen of different viruses every day. See how you can protect users of your Microsoft Word files against virus infection.

What can you do?

Normally you would create your texts using WordPerfect or MSWord. If you need to send such text with email to somebody, first think -- does it have enough formatted flavor and is this formatting so important to deserve sending it as a binary attachment? If yes then send it as a binary attachment -- yet have in mind the proper file format.

You can always select the text you are going to send in the working window of your text editor with a mouse, or hitting CTRL/A keys to select all. The selected text changes color. Now you may hit CTRL/C to copy the selection onto the Clipboard of Windows operating system.

Next you open your email composer window and paste the selection from the Clipboard into the email composer. Now you may need to do some manual formatting to make the pasted text to appear nicer in the text only email version.

The message is ready to be sent as a regular text file so much beloved by the Internet. The recipient will be able to read this message even if uses other computers and operating systems than Windows, and any email program in the world. There won't be any danger that a virus will get attached to this message -- an additional advantage!

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