Re: Request help

[Matt Ion <soundy -at- NEXTLEVEL -dot- COM>]

In <199512300650 -dot- WAA24161 -at- fun -dot- direct -dot- ca>, on 12/29/95 at 10:45 PM,
   Guy McDonald <guym -at- DAKA -dot- COM> said:

>I became very upset when hearing that my messages "crashed" another persons
>system, which certainly is NOT my purpose here.  I do not believe the
>problem was on her end, or the OKState server.  She uses Eudora, which I
>used last year, progressing to Pegasus, then EMC and now MS Exchange.

Eudora is (pardon my French) a piece of crap.  When I worked tech support at
an ISP, we had no end of calls from people whose Eudora (which we packaged
with the startup software we sent out, for some silly reason) was crashing
on a piece of mail.  Fortunately, it was usually easy enough for us to go
into the POP3 server directly and delete the offending articles, but that
doesn't excuse Eudora's behaviour.

I could never seem to find a common denominator.  The first time I ran into
the problem, someone's Eudora was hanging at 30% of a 1500-line attachment
someone had sent him... I though, okay, fine, there's a message-size limit.
But after I delete that message, Eudora STILL hung on the next message.
That next message turned out to be a two-liner from the same person, asking
if the recipient had got the previous attachment alright!  Inspecting the
message directly on the server, I could see nothing out of the ordinary in
it.

>"What I'm getting is  -not-  simply a garbled email message.  It is an
>attached file named WINMAIL.DAT that contains junk that I can't decode
>using  -either-  MIME or uudecode software.

I've been seeing those too.  They definitely APPEAR to be UUencoded, by the
data at the header of the attachment.  I never bothered to try to decode it,
because I don't really care what WINMAIL.DAT is.

>It is apparently some kind of .sig statement that WINMAIL adds to each outgoing
 >message unless you disable the 'feature'.  When received by another machine
 running >WINMAIL, it gets decoded into a little Windows ad.

Oh for... that is the hokiest thing I've ever heard of.  What will Microsoft
think of next?  Subliminal advertising in a window title bar??

>When it hits another type of email software, it chokes the sucker.

Hmm, I've never had that problem.  I would suspect that Eudora itself is not
very well equipped to deal with the unknown, and recommend a better mail
reader.

>begin 600 WINMAIL.DAT

Yup, definitely looks like UUencoding.  I'll try decoding it myself, see
what I come up with...

Hmm, MR/2 detaches it fine - it seems to contain the header information from
Guy's message, and the first line of text, amongst a pile of other stuff.
Very strange.



 Your friend and mine,
 Matt
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