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A number of digest subscribers have reported the problem of apparently
shortened digests - lots of articles listed in the table of contents,
but not so many actual articles. It would be useful, for gathering
statistics, to mention exactly what mailer you're using, including
version number.
The digests are sent as MIME multipart/digest emails. This means that
each article in the digest is included with whatever MIME headers it
had originally, and the overall digest defines a MIME "boundary"
separator that gets inserted between each article. Apparently, this
multipart/digest MIME type is given less attention by email-software
developers; AOL, for instance, flat-out doesn't support it, and AOL
digest subscribers can expect random behavior. I haven't spoken with
tech support people from other email vendors, but I can easily believe
that their treatment of multipart/digests is not fully rigorous.
Recently, some email programs seem to have become fond of sending mail
in multipart format, even for simple text messages. Messages are
duplicated in html format, for instance, or a binary "ms-tnef" or "RTF"
attachment is appended. These multipart emails define their own
MIME inter-part boundary, per the MIME standards, which gets included
within that article's header within the digest. My guess is that
some email readers become confused when a digest article defines a
"boundary" of its own, and that this confusion causes the truncation.
Not all reports of digest problems occur in those containing multipart
articles, however, so that cannot be a complete explanation. I suspect
that, like AOL, some mailers have random problems with a MIME type
they don't really support.
I don't use Microsoft Windows for email purposes, so I don't have
technical contacts at any of the popular email vendors. If someone
is interested, and has such contact information they can forward to
me, I'd be happy to ask those vendors which of their products supports
the MIME multipart/digest email type, and supply them with representative
samples for test purposes.
A possible workaround, when one is having problems with a digest, might
be to simply read it with something that knows nothing about MIME email,
like a simple text reader/editor. The digests are roughly 40K characters
in size, and are all printable-ascii, so any text editor should work.
The trick may be simply getting your email system to give it to you
in its raw form. And don't forget, you can always retrieve the most
recent fifteen digests, collected in a single mail folder, from:
ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/j/jimo/digests
--
jimo@xxxxxxxxxx
maintainer of the omega list
omega-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx
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