(Hope this wasn't agreed to before I started to pay attention to this
thread!) ... but

    Multipart may be wonderful someday, but it's like an open wound
    for a list owner today.

I've been tracking various problems on my lists for the past month or
more.  It's just coming together that almost all of these problems are
explained by multipart MIME articles.

Many of my readers have an e-mail client that "understands" multipart
MIME. Unfortunately, if they subscribe via DIGESTS, many of them
will see a garbled or out of order or duplicated sections, or missing
articles.

    (I'm not sure yet of the effect of LISTSERV MIME digest format on
    the problem, but many of my readers don't like how their mail
    client presents a MIME digest and hundreds of others subscribed
    before there was such an option as a MIME digest).

Also, I haven't yet tried to catalog the mail clients for which this is a
problem, but several major e-mail clients are affected.

Most of what I hear in this discussion is about the extra weight or
slickness of an attachment or HTML.  Although these attributes are
nice,

    MULTIPART ARTICLES PRECLUDE SUCCESSFULL DISTRIBUTION TO A
    SUBSTANTIAL PORTION OF OUR READERS!

Until this can be fixed, whether by LISTSERV or the e-mail software
producers, this is to me an academic exercise ...

    MULTIPART MIME is bad for a mailing list.

If people have discovered workarounds or if I have any part of this
story wrong, please share what you know with us all.

cheers, wayne


Wayne T. Smith                             mailto:[log in to unmask]
Systems Group - UNET                 University of Maine System
Co-owner of the College Hockey mailing lists