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en - 1. bad carriage returns for Outlook 98, and 2. multipart MIME problems for AOL

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  • From: "Adam Bernstein" <address@concealed>
  • To: "sympa-users" <address@concealed>
  • Subject: 1. bad carriage returns for Outlook 98, and 2. multipart MIME problems for AOL
  • Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 10:56:51 -0700

Two more minor bugs (not necessarily Sympa's) in 3.3.3, which I just
wanted to warn people about:

1. Bad carriage returns when saving list files:

When editing any list file (info, homepage, footer, etc.), including
at list creation time, the browser (at least IE on Windows) seems to
insert the familiar DOS ^M carriage returns at the end of every line.
That's not normally a problem, they're just ignored, but a list admin
just reported the problem that the resulting service messages show
up in Outlook 98 as having *no* linebreaks whatsoever, so the whole
message is just one unwrapped line. It seems Outlook 98 is confused
by these control characters; don't know if any other clients might be.

So now I'm just calling a little C program to strip out the ^M
characters (ASCII code 13), called after the list file is saved in
do_savefile and in do_create_list, and the service messages now show
up properly formatted in Outlook 98. There's probably a way to do it
within the PERL code, but as I barely know PERL, I have no idea how.

2. Multipart MIME problems with AOL:

I think there's a bug in the multipart MIME generation code, and/or
a bug in AOL's mail client (let's guess which, shall we?), which
results in multipart MIME service messages not being recognized as
multipart MIME. So the text and HTML versions of the service message
both show up as inlined text, with the second copy containing visible
HTML tags. The reason I wonder if it's actually a Sympa bug is that
I do notice a strange feature of these messages: The Message-ID and
Date headers seem to get inserted twice, with a different message ID
the second time, so viewing in Outlook 2000 I see the proper MIME
data but I also see these two lines beginning the message body (not
in the headers) on, for instance, a Welcome message:

Message-Id: <address@concealed>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 20:59:52 -0700 (PDT)

which doesn't seem quite right.

adam
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