Chemistry Friendly Mutt and his mates.

Mutt is a great mailer, not least because it allows a full range of mime types. However it does not allow the chemical mime type, which has since 1994 been widely used by chemists to display chemical diagrams and a host of other chemical objects. Many different chemical mime sub-types were proposed in the original proposal and more have been proposed since. Perhaps the most common use is to display a molecule that has been formulated by the Brookhaven Protein Data Base conventions (*.pdb) using the browser plugin Chime or the helper application RasMol. We should be able to send *.pdb files and other chemical objects as e-mail attachments by mutt and display them with the usual "auto_view" methods. Other chemical types and a fairly up-to-date list of references is given in an abstract of a paper by Henry Rzepa.

The use of the chemical mime type has been the subject of several academic papers. A recent paper and a review give references to others:-

• "The Application of Chemical Multipurpose Internewt Mail Extensions (Chemical MIME) Internet Standards to Electronic Mail and World Wide Web Information Exchnage", Henry S. Rzepa, Peter Murray-Rust and Benjamin J. Whitaker. Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Science, 1998, 38, 976-982.
• The World-Wide Web as a chemical information tool.Peter Murray-Rust, Henry S. Rzepa and Benjamin J. Whitaker. Chemical Society Reviews, 1997, 26, 1-10.

The purpose of this project is:-

1. to allow this to happen by providing a set of suitable patches to the mutt code.
2. to modify some of the scripts or programs to view chemical objects or to write new ones as required.

This page will report progress.

1. Changes to the mutt code.
2. Scripts to support Chemical mime.

Chemically cognisant email using elm and pine.

Email MIME Test

Email MIME Test Form that will send you an appropriate attachment - includes many chemical types.

Chemical Object Test for your web browser.