E-Mail, newsgroups, and forums

File Format
Name	E-Mail, newsgroups, and forums
Ontology	Electronic File Formats E-Mail, newsgroups, and forums

Formats for the storage or transmission of messages (singly or in groups) for electronic mail, discussion lists, forums, newsgroups, message areas of BBSs, etc.

Abbreviations, conventions, etc. in messaging

Online messages can be a language all their own, with different dialects for different types of messages, but often "leaking" from one service to another. Here are a few of the things to watch out for:

• Emoticons - smileys, frowneys, etc :-)
• Hashtags, at-signs, retweets, etc. - Twitterisms that often turn up elsewhere
• Txtspeak - various abbreviations sometimes used in chats

BBS Message Sections

• Fido BBS
• FidoNet message packets
• Opus BBS

Chat, Texting and Instant Messaging

• AOL Instant Messenger
• ICQ
• IRC
• Jabber
• SMS (text messaging on phones)

E-Mail

• AOL Mail
• Blue Wave
• Eudora
• Internet e-mail message format (RFC 733/RFC 822/RFC 2822/RFC 5322)
• Maildir
• mbox
• Pegasus Mail
• PST - Outlook Personal Storage Table
• QWK
• SOUP

Forums

• phpBB

Social Networking

• Facebook
• Friendster
• Myspace
• Twitter

Transfer Encodings

• Base64
• Quoted-printable
• Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF; winmail.dat)
• UUEncoding
• yEnc

Usenet

• NZB
• Usenet message format (RFC 850/RFC 1036/RFC 5536/RFC 5537)