On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 17:09 +0000, edward capullo wrote: > I have had inconsistent emails for this site also. For example I didnt get > John W's prior text nor did I get Chuck V's text now. I am on > Hotmail.com(MSN)-any suggestions as to why this just seems to have happened > in the last few days.....Eric???
I'm looking into it. The quick answer for the moment... don't send messages to the mailing list in HTML or RTF format. Most mailers allow you to specify a format to send (HTML, RTF or plain text). The problem is with conversion of certain HTML and RTF format messages into plain text. As you all know, we don't allow attachments or HTML messages on the list due to their ability to spread viruses and malware. Attachments just get stripped off of all incoming messages and unceremoniously discarded. That's easy.... The hard part is dealing with HTML and RTF. I could just flat out reject them, and bounce them back, but that seems rather rude. So I take the message, disassemble it, and rewrite it using just plain text. Every mailer *should* send all messages with a separate plain text version. That's the standard protocol. Unfortunately there are a couple of email programs out there that are broken and violate the standards and are only sending an HTML or RTF version of the message without the plain text version, or with an empty plain text version. What changed is that I used to run every message through a conversion up front that stripped attachments and converted everything to text. Unfortunately, that had the nasty side effect of making it much more difficult to detect spam. So I removed the brute force text conversion from the mail processing chain in the latest version and just rely on the sender to include the plain text version. Apparently there are still some people using old or broken mailers that don't format HTML and RTF messages correctly. Anyway, as I said, I'm looking at it trying to figure out what the best method to fix this is. If you send text only messages to the F500 list, then you won't have a problem. But send HTML or RTF messages to the list from a non-compliant mailer, and the anti-spam / anti-virus filters will eat the message body. --Eric _______________________________________________ F500 mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change options please visit: http://f500.org/mailman/listinfo/f500 *** Please, DO NOT send unsubscribe requests to the mailing list! ***
