"Chemmail": Volunteers please for a global experiment.

[Rzepa, Henry]

In our dept we have been using something which we call chemmail (for lack of a
better term) for a little while.

In this message,  I will briefly explain it, and then perhaps ask if anyone
could act to "beta test" to see if it can be deployed perhaps
on a wider scale.

Many of us are familar with  "enclosing" say a Word document with an email
message. But this is really a very unsatisfactory way of sending chemical
content (eg 2D/3D coordinates, spectra, protein sequences, wavefunctions,
etc etc) since Word can only really handle text, or perhaps embeded
objects which might or might not be resolved by  OLE at the recipients
and.

To improve matters,  one might use a combination of  Chime from
MDL and  say the Netscape messenger 4.04 module. If a chemical data
file in one of the so called chemical MIME formats
(see http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime ) is attached to a message, a
chemical MIME header is automatically added. The recipient of such
a message can use Netscape messenger to read the message. The
attachement is shown as a hyperlink, and clicking on it invokes
Chime to display the molecule, spectrum, surface etc tc.  (Chime 2 does
all of this).  And hey presto,  Chemmail is operation.

But of course, many people might wish to use stand-alone mailers,
such as eg  Eudora or Pine. How can Eudora/Pine be trained to speak the
same Chemical MIME language?  Well, proceed as follows

a) On a  Mac, place the file  http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemical10.sea.hqx
(after unpacking) into the same folder as your Eudora application.
Ensure you are running Eudora  3.0 or 3.1 (lite or  Pro).

b) On Win Eudora 3.0, add e.g the following lines(s)  to the Eudora.ini
file present in the same folder as the Eudora.exe file

both=pdb,pdb,TEXT,chemical,x-pdb
both=mol,mol,TEXT,chemical,x-mdl-molfile

(obviously, a complete list of  chemical MIME types can be added
in this fashion)

c) On Unix Pine 3.9+, add  e.g.
chemical/x-pdb; netscape %s
to your .mailcap file and  e.g.

chemical/x-pdb 	   pdb
to your  .mime.types file

Finally, ensure that on your file system, the filename qualifier
ends in eg .pdb  if you want to send a Brookhaven file.

>From now on, any combination of  Eudora/Pine or Netscape
Messenger  should correctly resolve chemical data files defined
by  MIME types.

Well, that's the theory. We have tested three platforms here
(Mac, NT and SGI Irix) and it mostly works. Our only problem
is persuading Netscape messenger on  SGI to attach the file;
it currently rolls it up into the main body of the text. We
are pondering this; if anyone has a fix, do let us know!

I am now seeking volunteers to a) receive files from us to see
if you can correctly resolve them and  b) to send files to us to see
if we can correctly resolve them. If anyone has proposals for
chemical MIME tpyes not handled by the current collection, do
please contact me. Suggestions for how other mail handling systems
might be persuaded to do this are also welcome
(eg Microsoft  Exchange, etc etc).




Dr Henry Rzepa,  Dept. Chemistry,  Imperial College,  LONDON SW7 2AY;
mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk; Tel  (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 



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