samba - Mar 1999 - Not Related: Ban Microsoft Outlook Express MUA from this list?

Hello,

I think that all the  problems  we  see  are  a  conjunction  of  two
factors :

1-   so-called  "modern"  MUAs  tend  to  overuse  MIME  attachements,
sometimes in very useless ways (such as HTML  versions  of  the  plain
text, quotations, and all kind of "cards"). Most of the time, they can
be configured to keep a lower profile. Netscape Communicator 4.5,  for
instance,  can  be  set  up  to  only  send pure ASCII and quote mails
replied  to  inline  the  good old way (">" prefix). Unfortunately
the
wise guys at Netscape did not find it fit to set  those  as  defaults.

2-  the  list  processor  program  used  for  Samba   lists   is   not
particularily clever in the handling of headers.  Actually  it's  even
very dumb. I know, we use the same exact one for our  internal  e-mail
lists.  More  specifically,  it  does  not  handle AT ALL headers with
continuation lines. He  eats  up  all  but  the  first  line,  causing
incomplete multipart mails (usually the "boundary" parameters misses).

So  what  ? unless the nice people who manage those lists can find the
time  to  switch to a better list processor like Majordomo, all we can
do is asking people :

- not to send any multipart mails :
	* do copy/paste logs or config files inline, not as attachements
	* disable any HTML evil (I hope Outlook can do that, I don't
          use it)
	* avoid  non-ASCII  characters  (many  MUA  would  convert  them  to
          quoted-printable or even worse base64 -- the HP CDE mailer does)
- disable vcards an all that nonsense
- disable auto attachement of PGP signatures too, this really confuses
  things in digests for people reading them with elm

Regards,
					-- Alain Fauconnet