[Leica] Re: Missing digest bits

[pieter@world.std.com (Pieter Bras)]

Brian Reid wrote to chaslor@mindspring.com:

>The problem you are having with lost mail from the digest is caused by
>the misconfiguration of the mailer of the person who sent the "brochure
>postscript" message.  It included, right at the point where your mailer
>went haywire, a Windows 95 artifact that looked like an
>Attachement/Enclosure of an illegal file called "winmail1.dat".  Your
>mailer went berzerko as a result of receving that illegal file.
>
>It seems to be a lost cause to get people to configure their mailers
>correctly. I see no option but for me to figure out how to program
>majordomo to reject all postings from people whose mailers are
>configured wrong.

Brian, please don't do this.  While I'd be the first to agree that
deliberately posting binary attachments is rude and disruptive, the fact
is that almost all of the binary attachments that find their way into
the digest are not put there deliberately.  Not everyone is an e-mail
guru, and some people have their software configured according to some
"company standard" which they can't change.

As software becomes ever more complex and feature-ridden, it becomes
harder for the average user, and particularly the beginning user, to
configure everything right.  I would rather put up with the occasional
short attachment than see someone blown off the LUG because of some
e-mail configuration problem.

Since you hint that you have the capability to detect the binary
attachments, why not just delete the attachments before incorporating
the message in the digest?  That would appear a less drastic solution.

Finally, I have some suggestions (helpful, I hope) for those who have
been screaming here lately about receiving truncated digests.  You can
tell if the digest is complete, or not, because there is always a
trailer message "End of Leica Users digest" at the very end of each
digest.  If you have a truncated digest, try downloading it again from
the listserver with a "get leica-users vxx.nyyy" command.  If this also
appears truncated, then your e-mail reader is probably chopping off the
digest at the point of some binary attachment.  If so, your software is
DEFECTIVE.  You should really consider replacing it with something else
that at least knows how to handle binary attachments correctly.  It is
slightly outrageous, to say the least, to demand that others accomodate
YOUR antiquated/obsolescent choice of e-mail software.

- -- 
Pieter Bras       (NOT a Windoz-user, by the way)