On Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:03:13 PDT, Kirsten Petersen <[log in to unmask]>  said:
> What effect, if any, does Listserv have on attachments?  I have a group
> of users who are experiencing the following problem:  When they send

It may not be Listserv's fault.

> The attachment is then included encoded in the message and has to be
> decoded (say with WinZip).  That solution works for me, but is
> apparently unworkable for my users.

Hmm.. since I was was actually there at the time, I'll take a stab
at explaining this... ;)

Another *possible* cause for this is mail passing through an older VM-based
system (where many Listserv servers still run).   The problem is that
the MIME spec requires 0-length lines at some points, and some older VM systems
are unable to deal with this, so they become blank-padded to a 1-blank line
instead.

There exist some mail programs that are tolerant of the 1-blank problem,
and treat this as a null line (which, in fact, is a bug, not a feature).
These mail programs will be able to decode the attachment.  Mail programs
that treat the erroneous blank correctly will be unable to do the decoding.

This was a known problem in the MIME design early on - Rick Troth, John
Gardiner Myers, and Steve Dorner were discussing this exact issue in the IETF
working group in the beginning of March 1995.  The working group consensus
at the time was that although the RFC822 "feature" in question was at best
bizzare and at worst not actually used, there was no good way to fix the
problem in the context of MIME without a major revision to RFC822.

--
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech