>AUTOREPLY > >You have sent me a blank message with an attachment.
>[...] > >I liked the idea and I tried. > >Since I already had an html filter in place, adding the autoreply feature >was a piece of cake. Now, it appears that most offending messages are in >fact virus. this means the autoreply goes either to a fake email address, >or to a real one, but stuffed with unread messages. The result is I >receive an additional message stating that my reply did not go through. Although I have "AUTOREPLY" at the top of my pasted message I do NOT use an automatic reply. I use it purely for the one-a-day messages* I receive which are blank with an HTML attachment. If it's a virus I don't bother. *As I run a web-based business, I get a lot of replies from uneducated customers, many of whom use email programs that are set up to send a blank mesage with HTML attachment. >I subscribe to a freedivelist with about 550 divers and the server is set >up to accept plain text only, and there are a significant number of >subscribers who can lurk but never post because they can't figure out how >to send plain text. They may need to change their email software. But mostly it's just a matter of abject ignorance. >but they say that they have received an automated message that they had >attempted to post to the list in "rich text." Why do I receive their >posts as plain text, but those same people can't get past the list >server? Probably because they are using MIME encoding. Emailer attempts to translate this as plain text, regardless, so you see it as an ordinary text message (often with "equals" symbols at the end of each line) but many email programs (eg. "Mail") will see the message as an attachment. I discovered this, recently, while using a PHP script to forward messages from an email form. I had to ensure that it was setting the "header" to plain text. >As I mentioned, most email clients will send both plain text and HTML >versions. That may be right but not in my experience. "Most" send either text or HTML. Only a few send both. I suppose I should spend some time going through my incoming message headers and listing which email clients do what by default! Martin Pickering (UK) ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
