On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Edward Becerra wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Redneck Gaijin wrote:

Second, someone sent a story in WPD format earlier today. This email locked
my Eudora email client up- the email would never download completely, so I
couldn't get to the following emails. I had to use my Netscape mail client
(which I hate) to clear out the offending mail.

	<chuckle> Bloody miracle that I find myself agreeing with Redneckm
but if he's talking about the story from a certain Emperor Steven The Mega
Man (blahblahblah) he's got a point. PINE, which I use, being limited to a
telnetted UNIX session, simply choked on that fic. Listed as being a 17K
attachment, when read, there simply WAS no attachment to opne, and no
text. Simply a blank letter that somehow still managed to be 17 K long. 

	MOST IRRITATING!

Heh...  It's often instructive to look at the header...

[snip]

Content-Type: multipart/mixed
Illegal-Object: Syntax error in Content-Type: value found on
ed.lbe.edu.on.ca:
	Content-Type:lucas.lbe.edu.on.ca@boundary=305190720054348SCHLUETES
					    ^-extraneous tokens in content
                                            type field

In other words, his mailer screwed up.  Looking at my mail spool, I see
that the file (in Base64 encoding) is there, but this error in the header
prevents it from being recognized. 

Message-Id: <97Sep17.150634edt.19@ed.lbe.edu.on.ca>
Resent-Message-ID: <"6RmVjD.A.9cH.CyCI0"@tendo-dojo>
Resent-From: fanfic@fanfic.com
X-Mailing-List: <fanfic@fanfic.com> archive/latest/43948
X-Loop: fanfic@fanfic.com
Precedence: list
Resent-Sender: fanfic-request@fanfic.com
Subject: [FFML] (fanfic)[Ranma]Ranma 1/2: The Fiancee He never Had. Pt1
X-UIDL: 682f7828fc5bf7eb24d68baf771a9220

Please remember, people: PLAIN TEXT FORMAT ONLY. That way, you don't get
flamed by people who either can't read the story or whose email clients have
been hosed by the attachment.

	Again, I find I gotta side with the Gaijin on this one, folks. 
Emperor Steve, _please_ stick with plain text, and paste it into the body
of the message. Attachments are for (listen _carefully_ now) BINARY FILES. 
You know.. misc.wav or misc.jpg or misc.gif or misc.zip.. files that HAVE
to be sent in binary format in order to work. Attachments were never meant
for text.

That's not quite true.  You can have an attachment of content-type
'text/plain', which is simply a text file.  It will be readable on _any_
mailer, whether it's MIME-aware or not.  Problems arise when you have
nonstandard ASCII characters (which force the mailer to use
quoted-printable or, even worse, base64 encoding), or binary files such as
word processor files, or a mailer that sets the content-type field of any
attachment to 'application/octet-stream'.  

Of course, having a totally broken mailer that mangles the header doesn't
help, either. :P

- Sean Connor (sec@frodo.com)  
 
        "It jams." - Intel TV ad, referring to the Pentium chip.