NOLUG mailing list bug (was Re: [Nolug] Thursday's meeting)

Jonathan Roberts <gremln007@gmail.com> writes:

> No, but I am glad it's not just me! :) I think they all come from the same
> person so maybe it is on the sender's end somehow.

This is definitely not the sender's problem. The problem is the
software that is adding the NOLUG information.

Joey, I suggest you have the signature line removed. We already know
the email is from NOLUG because you're modifying the subject.

Details:

The sender (Curtis) is sending a valid email. This email, by itself,
will be displayed by Gmail properly. The email is entirely base64
encoded and the header of the email indicates this. Gmail understands
that and doesn't have a problem.

Along the way, though, the NOLUG mailing list software adds 3 un-encoded
lines (the bit that says “Nolug mailing list”) at the end. It leaves
the message otherwise un-altered.

My mail client (and others, I suspect) can deal with this bugginess. It
sees the base64 block that the mail headers tell it to expect and
decodes it. Then it comes to the un-encoded block and says something
along the lines of "Darn bugggy software" and displays the unecoded
block as is.

GMail, however, sees the encoded and unencoded sections and says "I
guess the header was lying and this is all plain text". So it shows the
base64 encoded body.

It can be argued that Gmail is buggy. Certainly its solution isn't very
user-friendly.

But the real bug is in the mailing list software.

Mark.

-- 
http://hexmode.com/
Every day, mindful practice.  When the mind is disciplined, then the
Way can work for us.  Otherwise, all we do is talk of the Way; everything
is just words; and the world will know us as its one great fool.
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