Bo Peng wrote:
Please submit bug reports - to the makers of bad email clients.
I tried sending with thunderbird 1.0.7 and receiving with mutt - no problem.
Mutt has this problem in my case. I guess this is because your
thunderbird encoded the file (in base64 I assume) before it pass the
mail to sendmail, or did not use sendmail at all. Can you report here
the result when you send your lyx file with mutt?
I tried sending from mutt this time, and the attachment was
not encoded in base64 this time. It still got through without
any dot doubling. I put a dot after a footnote to get
a single dot - nothing bad happened.
As for reporting the bugs, I do not think sendmail will change this
behavior, and MS will not listen to me.
In that case - report it anyway, and proceed to not using their broken
software. Maybe you aren't in a position to replace sendmail with
qmail (it was qmail that didn't mangle my message) but at least you
can complain to whoever deploys sendmail on your behalf.
As for mail clients - one can usually change them. If the company demand
OE then one can still have another additional mail client (easiest with
IMAP,
as messages may be stored on the server for all clients to see) or
you may use a webmail service.
If the sendmail behaviour is broken then it ought to be fixed/replaced.
If sendmail is "standard", then mail clients should avoid forming
attachments that _will_ break. Encoding "problematic" files in base64 is
one such way. It usually happens automatically for binaries - the "binary"
test could be extended to cover files with the lf dot lf sequence
or even do base64 everytime. What happens if you put a single
dot on a line in the message text itself?
The workaround for users is simple - compress the file.
First, we need to let *everyone* know this. Second, it is not
convenient to compress and decompress a file.
An email client that add dots to dots (and removes the extras upon
reception) may also show the opposite problem - removal of doubled dots
that was supposed to be there. Rare, because you don't use double dots
much in text. But you never know what a binary file might contain.
Sure. So to completely avoid/fix this problem, we will have to wait
for the replacement of sendmail, which is unlikely to happen in the
near future.
Already happened here - we use qmail.
Now, I won't mind the next lyx being "nice" creating email-friendly
files. But the email software should be fixed regardless.
Helge Hafting
