Meta Refresh vs HTTP headers

Help! I can’t understand why my meta refresh tags disappear whenever I view them in a browser (IE 5.0 or NS 4.08)…they’re definitely being FTP’d correctly as I can see them in the viewer attached to my FTP program. Any ideas how I can fix this? (current tag is ). Do I need to use an HTTP header instead? And, if so, are there any simple tutorials out there? Thank you so much.