[Rhodes22-list] Problems with attachments to the list

[John Lock]

Hi folks,

I just wanted to throw in some information about the problems people 
are seeing sending attachments to the list -

It has very little to do with what OS you use.  It has everything to 
do with what kind of e-mail software you use.

Internet e-mail standards were never designed to carry binary data 
(such as photos).  However, as technology evolved, that became an 
obvious requirement and various schemes were devised to convert 
binary data into plain ASCII, so it would travel nicely through the 
mail transport system.  These encoding schemes are called things like 
MIME, UUEncode, BinHex, Base64 and others.

The reason some people can send attachments and others cannot is 
because of the way your e-mail software converts and packages the 
attachment for delivery.  The "Mailman" software that is running the 
mailing list is apparently only accepting one kind of encoding.  So, 
if your software happens to be doing exactly what Mailman expects, 
your attachment comes thru.  Otherwise, it gets sent to the bit 
bucket (or garbled, but that's uncommon).

If you are using web-based e-mail such as HotMail, Gmail, Yahoo, 
etc... you probably have little choice of what kind of encoding to 
use for attachments.  It's whatever the service provider decides to 
use.  If you use real e-mail software, like Thunderbird, Eudora, or 
Outbreak... uh, I mean Outlook, you can try fiddling with the 
attachment encoding settings to see what works.

If you are following along on www.nabble.com, there's yet another 
layer of software between the original e-mail and Nabble's threaded 
format.  However, if I understand correctly, Nabble still relies on 
Mailman to deliver the content that it then acts upon.

In the e-mail headers, there is a clue -

"X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.9"

This is telling us that some kind of filtering is going on, but we 
don't know what its parameters are.  Until we can get Michael 
Meltzer's attention and feedback on what the Mailman software expects 
for attachments, there's not much we can do.

Cheers!

John Lock
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s/v Pandion - '79 Rhodes 22
Lake Sinclair, GA
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