[hpsdr] why are my messages being bounced as 'too big'?

[Lars E. Pettersson]

Mail is a can of worms... :)

On 08/01/2012 04:49 AM, John Miles wrote:
> I've used various versions of Outlook for years.  Quite a few of the
> messages I receive from the hpsdr list arrive with no body text at all
> except for the tag line ("***** High Performance Software Defined Radio
> Discussion List *****.")  Instead, there are three attached files, two .txt
> files and an .htm.

I have no problem whatsoever while using Thunderbird. So this seem to be 
Outlook specific.

If you have problems with mail, take a look at the source of the mail 
for answers to why things does not work as expected. In Thunderbird it's 
using ctrl-U, I do not use Outlook, so I do not know what to use there, 
but it should be there somewhere.

> In the case of Chris Albertson's most recent reply, for instance, these
> attachments show up as "Untitled attachment 00296.txt (2KB)," "Untitled
> attachment 00299.htm (2KB)," and "Untitled attachment 00302.txt (418 B)."

If you look at the source of Chris's latest message you will see the 
line "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=..." in the header, 
indicating that the body is a mix of different encodings, charsets, or 
something else, divided as parts in the body using a tag with a number 
of 1175302859.

The first part uses us-ascii and 7-bit encoding showing the **** High 
Performance... line.

The second has two alternatives, the first using plain text and 
ISO-8859-1, and the second using HTML and ISO-8859-1 (this is Chris's 
text in two versions, plain text and HTML).

And the final part consist of the mailing list footer in 7-bit encoding 
using us-ascii.

In the Outlook case it should display either the *** line plus the text 
part and the footer, or the *** line plus the html part and the footer. 
It should not do what you see, just the *** line and a couple of 
attachments.

Do you have a setting in Outlook named "Display Attachments Inline"? If 
so, turn it on, and the mail body should hopefully show up as expected, 
showing all three parts at once. You could perhaps also play with how 
the body should be viewed, HTML or plain text (in Thunderbird one has 
the alternatives Original HTML, Simple HTML, or Plain Text, I am using 
Original HTML).

> I have a hard time believing that this particular nonstandard behavior is
> "M$ Outrook"'s fault, because it doesn't affect any other of the dozens of
> mailing lists I read.   More likely, the list manager is using some sort of
> unusual configuration option that could be fixed if the admin(s) were aware
> of it.

Outlook should be able to show the message correct, even when it is 
chopped up of different parts containing different encodings and/or 
charsets.

It's a while since I worked with mailman (the software that this mailing 
list uses), but perhaps one could play with the setting of the charset 
for the header and footer to see if that helps (not sure if one can 
change that though). But in a mixed environment, with different 
charsets, and some using plain text, others html, these problems, or 
versions of them, will show up whatever you do on the mailman (program) 
side.

73 de Lars, sm6rpz
-- 
Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se>
http://www.sm6rpz.se/

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