Hello fellow Arachnids: I just received several copies of an email addressed to about a hundred recipients in the "To:" header. The purpose of the email was to inform the sender's correspondents of his new email address. The message body consisted of a brief note to explain the purpose. It appears that the sender thought he was sending a perfectly legitimate email. Of course we might well criticise him for not having sent the message to a hundred or so "BCC:" recipients instead of to the same number of "To:" recipients, but that is beside the point that I wish to discuss here. I don't know why I received several copies of the same message. Maybe an operator error, maybe a server error.
>From the raw CNM message files received by my Arachne I see that the sender wanted to indicate both his real legal name *and* his nickname in the "From:" header. The format he used for his "From:" line was like this: From: "Samuel\"my_nickname\"Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The above is just an example for illustration purposes only to indicate the type of format he used for his "From:" header. The sender left his "Subject:" header blank. BTW, the mailer program the sender was using was MicroSoft Outlook, Build 10.02616. Maybe his mailer program automagically writes "From:" headers in this format for those who want to indicate both their real legal names and their nicknames. When the CNM message files were rendered into HTML by Arachne some very strange things happened and my inbox got all screwed up in the most unspeakable ways. I couldn't use Insight for reading my messages, but I was able to read them by examining the raw CNM files. It appears that no messages and no data were lost. There was no real damage but there sure was a hassle to contend with because I could read my messages only as CNM text files. Among the problems encountered were the "From:" headers and the "Subject" headers in the HTML rendering of every message in the inbox, to include also the messages that were sent to me by others. Has anybody else experienced a similar problem which we might attribute to a really strange formatting of the "From:" header? BTW, does anyone know of any correct RFC compliant methods whereby one can indicate in his "From:" header both his real legal name *and* his nickname? I want to be helpful to the sender of the message I received by informing him as to how he might best correct the problem he is causing. Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
