Jacob Haller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> This past week, when they sent out mailings they got back some complaints
> that the subscriber had received a message with no body.  Not everyone had
> this problem (in fact these people seem to be a pretty small minority), but
> this has never happened before.  In one case, one person was sent a full
> copy of the message wheras another account at the same site was sent a
> blank one (I take this information from bounce messages).
>
> We're investigating this at our end, but has anyone here run into this
> problem before, and if so what was the cause?

A far-out possibility:

Once I saw a message in which every line started with a tab.  Somehow
a mailer saw this as a continuation of the last header line, so the
entire message was treated as a header line, leaving no body.

This is incorrect behavior, of course.  Header lines can have
continuation lines if they begin with tabs (or other whitespace?  not
sure).  However, there was a blank line separating headers and body,
the correct indicator of "end of headers", but one mailer was ignoring
that fact.

The "solution" for us was to ask the sender to stop using the tab to
prefix all of his lines.

Good luck.

En paz,
Steve
--
Stephen W. Thompson, U. of PA, Data Administration, 215-898-1236, WWW has PGP
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