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