[Leica] Re: Missisng Digest Bits

[Brian Reid <brian@reid.org>]

> I find it difficult to believe that my mailer 
> could simply VERY CLEANLY remove certain posts and leave others 
> unaffected. 

Please trust me on this. This is indeed what is happening.

The multimedia mail standard says that if you are going to include fancy
stuff in an email message, your mailer software must do these things:

1. Declare in the message header (the thing with the To: and From: in it)
that you will be doing this, including a declaration of the revision number
of the encoding standard that you will be using.
2. Correctly label each and every instance of a fancy thing.
3. Adhere to some published standards for how to encode the fancy thing.

The sender's mail program in question is failing to do #2 and #3, and the
Majordomo digest software is (correctly) removing #1. This means that the
digest goes out with an unexpected (there is no warning in the header)
unlabeled incorrectly-formatted object in the middle of the digest. While
it is never good for a program to fail, anybody who has ever written a
program knows that one of the bugaboos of all computer programs is that
they are given data to process that they did not expect to be given, and
reacted badly.

I'm not sure I can figure out how to program the list software to strip
illegal attachments out of incoming messages, because the only way I know
for certain that something is an attachment is that it conforms to the
requirements of being an attachment, i.e. it follows the rules. But then
it's not an illegal attachment.

I'm going to think about this problem some more.

Brian Reid