Hi guys, especially Ben Parker (I think),

I temporarily suspended my email from this list a few weeks ago, and I
think I may have missed something important.  However I searched the
archives and I think I MAY have picked up a clue to what's going on with my
new bottom banner.  Here's my current situation:

My new bottom banner is appearing on less than half of all the posts to the
Stutt-L list at Temple.  41 out of 93 posts since May 4th, DO have
it.  That's only 44%.  The remain 56% do NOT have the banner at all.  <sad
face>

The bottom banner was installed on May 4th.  I used the web interface to
install it (exactly as I had done on a test list that Stan Horwitz had set
up for me).  I have never had trouble with the web interface.  But just to
satisfy myself I did a ...

       GET STUTT-L.mailtpl

via email on the Temple server and got back ...

      >>> BOTTOM_BANNER Bottom Banner for list postings
      .FO OFF

      ** Sign off: mailto:[log in to unmask]
      ** Archives and settings:
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/stutt-l.html
      ** FAQs and Help: http://www.mankato.msus.edu/~stutter/stuttlfaq.html
      .FO ON

which all looks normal to me.  (I'm a little surprised that I didn't get
EVERYTHING back like the default.mailtpl with the BOTTOM_BANNER section
modified, but I didn't.  I just assume this is normal.)

Then I announced the new bottom banner by posting to the list - and the
bottom banner WASN'T there!  <red face!>  Then I sent out a second
announcement apologizing for the absence of the banner - and there it
WAS!  <double red face!>  Figuring that computers are truly the tools of
the devil, I stopped posting entirely and simply watched other posts appear
and sure enough about half of them have the bottom banner and half do
not.  'Tis a puzzlement...

I thought that maybe the list at Temple was being run on two separate
mirrored servers, one which contained the new bottom banner and one which
never got the update.  I know mirrored servers are not SUPPOSED to get out
of sync like that, but the devil can make strange things happen.

After much delay and confusion I read a post from Ben Parker on 4/19
(BEFORE my problem) which said in part...

>there is a long known issue of banners seeming to disappear when MIME messages
>are sent.  Due to the technical nature if how MIME messages are formed the
>banners are added outside of the MIME boundary areas and thus cannot be seen
>in most mail clients.  This problem has been corrected in the forthcoming 1.8e
>release of LISTSERV.  In fact, separate banners can be defined for plain-text
>and HTML messages.

That adds even more mud to the waters.  Say what?  MIME messages?  Am I
supposed to understand what a MIME message is?  And what to do when I get
(or send) one?  I'm a newbie to this kind of stuff.  Is that an answer to a
different problem than I have?  Help!

If it matters, my mail client is Eudora 5.1, running on Windows 98, 750 Mhz
processor, 256 meg RAM.  Apple pie normal I'd guess.

I await your words of wisdom...

Thanks,

Russ

[log in to unmask]
Dallas, Texas
972-881-1451 home, 972-489-6169 cell
my home page: http://www.RussHicks.com