At 7:27 PM -0700 12/6/02, Warren Michelsen imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
At 7:48 AM -0500 12/06/2002, Bill Cole wrote:
At 11:16 PM -0700 12/5/02, Warren Michelsen  imposed structure on a
stream of electrons, yielding:
One of my clients, using Eudora Pro 5.x for Windows, reports that
some people receiving her email say they are received with the
content as a ".rtf" attachment. Her Eudora is set to send as plain
text and I've verified that there is nothing other than ASCII in
her notes when I receive them.

I figure that the recipients' mail system is fiddling with the
message contents in some way. Perhaps they use web-based mail that
sticks ads in everything with the result that the message content
becomes incidental. I dunno.

Anyone heard of this problem?
Yes. I've heard of it happening when Eudora for Windows is set to
use the Microsoft composition and rendering engine. This is a
configuration choice in Eudora for Windows. It's generally a bad
idea to use that feature, as it opens up a number of attack holes
usually reserved for the MS mail clients.
I've looked and I cannot see where this configuration option is in
my Eudora 5.1 on Win 98SE. There is an option to use MS's rendering
engine for viewing mail. I don't see a comparable option for
composing mail.
From the evidence I've seen, one brings the other, at least sometimes.

IF you send mail with formatting that can't be rendered in plain text, Eudora (any version >3.0 on either platform) will create the mail as a RTF, HTML, or compound document. I have seen a situation where the HTML emitted from Eudora is very Microsoftian (even using an MS XML schema explicitly) and another case (I believe from Eudora 4.x) where the entire message was MIME-marked as an RTF file. Given Eudora's wide configurability, I may have misinterpreted the source of the latter incident.

Besides which, I've looked at the headers and nothing their
indicated rtf or styled or anything other than plain text ASCII.
You mean with the specific mail in question?? That's very odd, and would indicate a problem with the recipient's end. If the message has no MIME markings making it an RTF file, no client should be making that interpretation. Of course, if you are just seeing some other message this user has sent and not the particular ones that show up badly for others, you may not have the right info for troubleshooting.

As I said, Eudora tries to detect when it needs something more than plain text, and can do a number of different things. I set it to ask me what to do (I have it strip the formatting and send plain, 99% of the time, since the formatting is usually a result of mail I'm replying to) but you can set it to always send 'rich' text (with RTF or HTML selectable) when needed and to either send just the 'rich' version or a multipart-alternative form that has both plain text and the enhanced format. That's in the 'Styled Text' settings panel in the Mac version, but I think the RTF/HTML choice is only accessible via the x-eudora-setting route or editing the settings file. I have no idea where to access the deeper Eudora settings on Windows.


--
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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