Re: Why do lusers break email?

Brian Kantor <brian@xxxxxxxx> writes:

In article <vrk2a7-hap.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Michel <abuse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In retrospect, I should've responded with 5 pages of lorem ipsum
and a little note up top that says "answers inline in #fefefe".

I'm getting real good at writing
"Your last email was unreadable here.
Please resend in plain text only."

Two marginally-related true tales of recent happenings:

The sniversity senate president wants to send a mailing to faculty, but
finds our (vendor-provided) spam-filtering software rejects it as too
spammy. No wonder, the message he was sending contined some pretty
awful HTML. It turns out he wasn't even intending to send it that way
but if he tried pasting in certain kinds of "rich text" it was converted
to the awful HTML by his client. With some temporary whitelisting and
some care to make sure the mail is sent as plain text his further
messages go through without interference.

An outside domain contacts us because one of their users can't send
attachments to one of our users, although interestingly their other
users have no trouble sending attachments to our same user. A little
careful inspection reveals that plain old MIME attachments are working
just fine, but the problem user is sending attachments as, great
freaking Cthulhu, JVAZNVY.QNG blobs. Someone obviously needs to get a
better mail client.

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Exchange Encoding...
    ... The Plain Text setting will ensure the content-type of the messages are ... text/plain, but the content-transfer-encoding will be Quoted-Printable. ... If you are sending attachments and also writing some text in the message, ... > If I have use Plain Text checked on Internet Message Formats, ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange2000.admin)
  • Re: ATT#####.dat - but not what you think
    ... I've got a user who is sending attachments and the whole thing is ... alpha-num). ... it goes through with the .DAT even when sending in plain text. ... Brian Tillman ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook)
  • Re: Receiving attachments
    ... Make sure when sending attachments with Outlook to use plain text format. ... Gary VanderMolen, MS-MVP (Mail) ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.mail)