VMARTYN.UK.ORACLE.COM wrote:
>
> Paul D. Christensen wrote;
>
> >Attachments is a subject I have often thought to address to this
> >group.  Rember the KISS rule when sending messages.
>
> I agree - what I think is strange is people sending all of their
> message as an attachment.

<soapbox>

The "sending all of their message as an attachment" phenomenon is due to
more and more mail clients (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Eudora,
Exchange, ...) are doing rich text format (Content-type: text/enriched),
and/or using 8-bit character sets/quoted-printable encoding, or plain
downright HTML (Netscape Communicator 4) by *default*.  This is
compounded by some clients which will send the message in *both* formats
under a Content-type: multipart/optional -- the "smart" clients then
choose the "best" format that they understand to display.

Meanwhile, people further down the least common demoninator scale of
mail clients suffer through these "attachments" as encoded gibberish
on the screen, unidentified encoding/attachment types, or worse.

For this reason, I encourage everyone to try and insure that their
postings are sent in a clear, "least-common-denominator" format - plain
old text.  If you have the means to do so, mail yourself a message and
look at the raw message text (in Netscape versions < 4.0, this is done
by View...Source; in Netscape 4.0 by View...Page Source).  If the
message has a MIME wrapper, check the Content-type: and encoding: values
to see that they are text/plain and a standard character set.  If not,
you might be well served by exploring the configuration options in your
mail client to see if you can tweak them to produce suitable text.

</soapbox>

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>