Re: Prolem with attachments.

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> krause@sdbk.de (Sebastian D.B. Krause) writes:
> 
>> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr> writes:
>>> message exceeds message-send-mail-partially-limit. Send in parts ? 
>>>
>>> And I answered yes. 
>>
>> If you say Gnus that it should send the mail in parts it does so. So
>> just say 'no' here.
> 
> But why  should it send it  in parts ?  

Because there are /still/ a lot of email gateways that bounce large
messages or, worse, drop them silently or return a permanent fatal error
when one is sent through them.

> When is asked the question, I thought about multipart ?

Maybe you could suggest a better way of phrasing a question that means:

        Should Gnus split this message up into smaller parts
        for transmission to avoid problems with mail gateways?

> Is the real question "Should I send the message in a readable format?"

Depends on your point of view. Many people who read the alt.binaries.*
hierarchy can read 'message/partial'[1] mail.[2]

> None  of Gnus, 

Sure it can, at least with a recent Gnus. Hitting 'b' when viewing the
first part of, say, a 'message/partial' tiff works fine for me. :)

> Yahoo mail, 

That doesn't surprise me, because they suffer the same disease as
every Windows MUA that I have met: they assume that messages are
structured in one very simple way, so don't bother with a real MIME
parser or display system.

> and mutt seem to be able to read these multipart messages, so ...

metamail should be able to put them together. I am actually surprised
that Mutt can't, though. Are you /sure/ that it can't reassemble the
attachment?

        Daniel


Footnotes: 
[1]  Er, is it 'message', 'application' or what? I can't remember. *sigh*

[2]  At least, I presume they can. There are certainly enough of them
     going through the thing. :)

-- 
Maybe I am not very human - What I wanted to do was
to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
        -- Edward Hopper