Tommi Thompson wrote,
| Actually, one other person, one time, triggered truncation.
| His message did end in two rows of asterisks, which were visible
| in single and digest, and after which nothing at all appeared...
| no footers on the single, no subsequeqent message or footers in
| the digest. That one did not puzzle me. I tho't the lines of
| asterisks constituted the problem.
They probably did.
| On closer inspection, in her messages as received in AOL email,
| footers didn't disappear completely, but were affected and oddly
| corrupted. Sample below.
| When asked, she said that her original message had nothing
| under her first-name-only signoff, "Carol"
Right now I'll bet on Alexander Verbraeck's theory of an embedded ^Z over
anything I said before.
| The only corruption in that 2nd 3-part footer
| is the leading *two* periods on a blank line, when only one
| period had been inserted there, in my config file.
I think it's standard SMTP to represent a literal period at the beginning of
a line with two periods so that it won't be taken as the period to end a
message. However, that happens the same with all articles in your list's
digest issues and wouldn't be particular to Carol's posts.
| Melissa's was the post after Carol's. I've never seen
| single messages contaminated, mooshed together this way.
That can be a locking problem, but it would show up randomly and not select
Carol's submissions.
[I suggested automatically indenting the bodies of her posts by one column
in case the problem was having some particular string flush left.]
| Oooo, interesting idea. I'm not sophisticated enough to make that
| happen automatically, nor is the bestserv list automation software.
| She didn't like being "moderated," so she left. She was a pretty
| good contributor, so if I found an automatic way to handle it, I
| might entice her back, but my posting her messages was my solution
| and she didn't like it at all. Affected her sense of spontaneity and
| autonomy.
If the problem is a ^Z, indenting won't help after all.
| Can an EOF marker be invisible? And can it cause corruption of footers
| in some cases rather than simply eliminating them outright?
Yes, it can be invisible, and there's no telling exactly what it can cause.
Good luck.
