On Mar 5, 2004, at 11:05 AM, Sean Lewis (MBD) wrote:
Although the inception of a "windows friendly" button in the Panther xmailer
interface does insinuate that there has been a problem with early releases.
So... why no fix for Jaguar users?
Because <gasp> the problem is that Apple actually followed the RFC's regarding attachments in e-mail and Microsoft Word *insists* on attaching a resource fork to Word files.
Well, until OS X all Mac files had data and resource forks.Right? And email send to Windows people worked just fine...
Mail is making the attachment for the email, not Word, so although MS Word still makes data and resource forks (the implication here is that no other X app does, right?) Mail _should_ still send the data fork, just fine, and leave the rest be. I've never seen data and resource fork issues (issues due to their being included on sent mail) prior to OS X Mail, all the clients I've ever used would send mail that worked regardless (on some Mac system you had to reassign the resource fork, of course, but that's trivial and your data is still intact), and Windows was happy if you fed it the right .suffix.
What Mail does is then send the message as *three* attachments: The body of the message, as a text attachment, the data fork and the resource fork, which segment has the same name as the data fork. This is correct, as per the governing RFC's. (I forget which ones)
I need to wean my wife off of the webmail anyway, it's a pain technically although useful for reading remotely. Have your dept techs a Windows mail client to suggest that *does* handle these fine?
Mail clients are supposed to manage these attachments, but many (not all) see two attachments with the same name, and simply take the last one (or first one, I forget which it is) which is the resource fork, which results in a "messed up" attachment. We saw this here with our web clients. We used two different ones, one showed both attachments, one showed only one, the wrong one. Look at the raw source of one of the problematic e-mails some time.
Which is where I got the mime header I sent on the first message.
Sorry, I still see this as a OS X Mail failing, primarily. There's "correct" and there's "reality" and the reality is that this is just one more thing that makes Macs look half-assed and incompatible (this issue shows you can't use them to send email that others platforms can easily handle). Poorly done, IMO.
B
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