unborking tlug sig

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 11:18:34AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> This seems like a Keystone Cops thread.  Here's my simple theory that
> explains everything:
> 
> 1) Android's email MUA never sends unencoded plain text.
> 1a) It uses base64, or
> 1b) MIME (and the MIME components are probably encoded too, but that
>     is not relevant).
> 
> 2) TLUG's mailing list software tacks a plain text sig on all emails.
>    As if they were unencoded plain text messages (it would still work
>    if they were encoded as quoted printable text).
> 
> 3) (1) and (2) don't mix well.  What the recipient sees of the wreck
>    depends on the recipient's MUA
> 
> 3a) (1a)+(2) in some MUAs shows up as crap at the end of the message.
>     In others, it is just suppressed.  The TLUG footer certainly isn't
>     readable.
> 
> 3b) (1b)+(2) seems to show up as no visible TLUG footer, but no
>     APPARENT damage.  I think that technically the message is broken
>     because the TLUG footer is not properly MIME encapsulated.
> 
> My MUA (Alpine) lets me look at the raw message to see what is going
> on.  Surely yours does too.  Look: don't guess.
> 
> | From: Russell Reiter <rreiter91-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
> 
> | No Tlug footer on your message.
> 
> Not true.  His was case 3b.  The footer was in the message.  Your MUA
> didn't show it to you.
> 
> | In an effort to back-trace the problem, I'm going to try to disable
> | Latitude, GPS and Google location as I'm thinking that the
> | co-ordinates used by for location, rather than being sent in plain
> | text are being bundled into a mime format in order to be parsed by a
> | GIS system which either cannot or will not recognize plain text.
> 
> I don't see how that could be at all related.  But you never know.
> 
> | I refuse to believe that I cannot use linux to send a plain text
> | message and I balk at having to root my device to do this.
> 
> I agree with your sentiment.  But Android, at this level (MUA), is not
> really Linux.  And the error report seems to indicate that Google
> doesn't consider this always-encode-base64 a bug.

It doesn't count as a bug to me.

The only bug discovered so far is the mailing list software in use
for TLUG.  It clearly doesn't have a clue how to handle proper emails
when appending that footer unless they are plain old ascii.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
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