Kathleen Bruce, among others here, noted some recent problems with list
digests sent to AOL turning into attachments.

We're field-testing our newer, faster, shinier inbound Internet mail gateway
software, and it's got some bugs.  Two of the bugs in particular bit digests:

1. All mail that contained a message/rfc822 as one of the parts, or was sent
in quoted-printable or base64, got mistakenly turned into attachments.
 Normally, only messages over 25k should become attachments (because older
AOL clients can't read more than 32k of text).

2. All mail that got turned into an attachment would have the wrong extension
on Windows, and the wrong file type on Mac, so if someone double-clicked on
the file it wouldn't automatically open.

Problem #2 was fixed earlier in the week.  Problem #1 has been fixed on one
gateway, and will be rolled out to the rest of our new gateways shortly.

Adding to the confusion was the fact that we're still running our old
gateways, which don't have these bugs, so some list recipients might get the
message normally while others received it as an attachment.

Thanks for all your patience.  Once this new gateway architecture is fully
implemented, you'll see a big difference in mail delivery to AOL.

Jay Levitt
Manager, Mail Systems Dev
AOL