On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Donald Good wrote:

>As a GroupWise admin, I would like to clarify slightly.  The system default for
>the GroupWise Internet mail gateway is usually set up for Mime delivery of
>attachments.  This message is coming from GroupWise.  The Novell
>recommended setup is for the admin to create an alias to the gateway so that
>the user can select uuencoding of attachments.  For example:
>To send via the Mime default:
>"[log in to unmask]"@INTERNET
>but to send with uuencode instead:
>"[log in to unmask]"@UUENCODE

I was aware of this possibility, and have mentioned it in the past to
listowners on behalf of GroupWise subscribers, but it depends on the
GroupWise administrator being willing to set up the alias.  The
reports I have gotten, filtered second-hand, are that most
administrators don't want to bother.

The GroupWise administrator here set up such an alias at one point but
never bothered to advertise it.  I knew about it only because someone
on an internal university list I was subbed to knew about it and chose
to inform the listmembers.

Those who don't want to take the time can skip the rest of this
message, as the story is a bit off topic, but it still relates to the
subject of virtually unreadable messages on mailing lists.  While
GroupWise is no longer being used here, it was implemented at several
departments here back when WordPerfect owned it and it was called
"WordPerfect Office".  My original memory is that Groupwise messages
sent outside of Groupwise were wrapped with hard returns the way you
would expect a normal plain-text message to be wrapped.  Somewhere in
the upgrade and configuration process a couple of years ago that
ceased to be true...messages sent outside GroupWise were now wrapped
at the 80th position...whether that was between words or in the middle
of a word...except that when the submitter had typed in a hard return
at the end of a paragraph, that line would terminate normally.  I did
not have the facility at that point to determine whether Groupwise
itself was doing the line wrapping at position 80 or whether it was in
fact not wrapping lines in the paragraph at all.  Messages sent within
Groupwise were fine, since it does its own wrapping when it displays
messages, but messages sent to non-Groupwise users were almost
impossible to read.  This included messages sent to internal mailing
lists hosted on Unix servers, even when they were delivered back to
Groupwise accounts.

To deal with this, the GroupWise administrator changed the default for
Internet messages from UUENCODE to MIME, so everything went out as
quoted-printable.  Only he didn't tell anyone about it.  This resulted
in total devastation on some internal mailing lists with subscribers
whose mail systems couldn't handle quoted-printable encoding and saw
it in its full raw glory in the messages from Groupwise users.  Since
I was using a IBM VM/CMS mail system (now deceased) that was not
MIME-capable for mail from some of those lists, I was among the users
affected.  It was actually even worse.  Since "short headers" were
being used for these lists, the headers identifying the MIME-encoding
method were stripped off and so *everyone* got the raw
quoted-printable format in all its glory.  It was by way of a message
during this period sent on one of those lists that I learned that the
Groupwise administrator could set up aliases of this type.

A couple of weeks later amid all the flak the default was changed back
to UUENCODE.  At that point I could not tell whether we still had the
ability to use MIME encoding if we wanted to or not.  Since I wasn't
using Groupwise for all of my mail it wasn't really a burning issue.

And in this situation it really appeared to be a case of "name your
poison".  With UUENCODE you were guaranteed to get near-unreadable
messages, with MIME you were guaranteed to get messages that were a
pain in the neck to people with non MIME-aware mail clients...which
there were still a fair number of at the time.

In time the administrator of the list I was on learned that by using
full headers, the MIME encoding could be translated by at least the
Groupwise subscribers back into a readable message, and in time the
Groupwise message default was changed back to MIME, and I wrote a
little script that stripped the quoted-printable garbage out of the
messages displayed on my VM account, and things settled down.

The University administration is now trying to persuade as many
departments as it can to use a common E-mail system instead of the
plethora of E-mail systems that used to exist across the University.
The decision was made to use Microsoft Outlook/Exchange for that
common system and all the departments that used GroupWise have now
converted to it.

I'm sure this little story illustrates some of what I don't like about
GroupWise (in this case the fact that you're at the mercy of the
system administrator with regard to your mail settings, and that
GroupWise's interface to the non-Groupwise world is somewhat less than
perfect), but the point that is really relevant here is that while
most of the subscribers out there who are sending messages that some
of the other subscribers can't read can in fact correct the problem if
they know what to do, there are a few who really can't do anything
about it.

Dennis