HW: On the 8th Day of Forever....

[Paul Mather]

On Fri, 30 May 1997, Dave Ellison wrote:

> >Attachment Converted: C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\WWW\ATTCHMNT\ReHWOnt1
>
> I am a lurking boc-l'er, and have been receiving a number of ReHWxxx
> attachments, as above, from you.  What are they?

They are the pernicious proprietary hand of Microsoft at work.  This
particular annoyance has been pioneered on BOC-L by "Pops" Shipley[*], but
has been taken up by ever-increasing numbers as Microsoft's perverse
notion of "standards" infects a yet wider audience.

Certain Microsoft e-mail clients, if not instructed otherwise, will
automatically append the text of an e-mail message to the e-mail body in a
proprietary "rich" format that only Microsoft e-mail clients understand.
This is done to preserve "rich formatting" such as font changes, colours,
etc.  Alas, this at least doubles the size of the mail message, to no real
advantage (particularly on a public list such as this).  Worse, in some
mail clients (such as Eudora), it results in a steady buildup of junk
files in the attachments directory.

As far as I know, all the e-mail clients that operate in this unfriendly
fashion allow the proprietary attachment feature to be disabled.  In
MS-Exchange, for example, it can be disabled on a per-recipient basis (so
you could switch it off when e-mailing only to BOC-L for example).  Many
users do not know how to do this, alas, or don't even realise their e-mail
clients are adding this extra baggage to their outgoing mail.

Oh well, it could be worse; it could be one of those annoying e-mail
clients that sends e-mail only as HTML. :-(

I hope this clears up the confusion.

Cheers,

Paul.

[*] Hey Craig, I'm only kidding.  You know we all love ya.  Btw,
congratulations on the new addition to the Shipley clan.  What are you
going to call her?  Zarozinia Stacia Shipley has a certain something to
it... ;-)

obCD: Hawkwind, _Kings of Speed, Lords of Light_

e-mail: paul at csgrad.cs.vt.edu                    A stranger in a strange land.