One of the myriads of bugs with RFC 1522

From: Alain LaBont\i - SCT (alb@riq.qc.ca)
Date: Thu Sep 25 1997 - 21:59:20 EDT


Just seen on a mailing list:

>Return-Path: <recode-forum-owner@IRO.UMontreal.CA>
>From: keld@dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen)
>Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 02:43:50 +0200
>X-Charset: ISO-8859-1
>X-Char-Esc: 29
>Mnemonic-Intro: 29
>To: recode-forum@IRO.UMontreal.CA
>Subject: Re: Recode library
>Cc: Pretesters for recode <recode-pretest@IRO.UMontreal.CA>
>Sender: owner-recode-forum@IRO.UMontreal.CA
>Reply-To: recode-forum@IRO.UMontreal.CA
>
>=?iso-8859-1?Q?Martin_J=2E_D=FCrst?= writes: <<<-----------------
>
>[...]

[Alain] :
I also saw yesterday under Netscape's email an attachmenet with a file name
whose type was not recognized because it contained accented characters; the
mail had been sent using RFC 1522, the default toggle in, say, Eudora,
when users don't change it... At my office we do the change everywhere but
elsewhere they don't even know that it is the source of thousands of their
problems. Eudora is just a case in point, othe remail progrrams tend to
follow the same dogma totally unadapted to non-English speaking communities.

Netscape was not able to recognize the file type and in practice it meant
that the user had to "go to hell".

I lost an hour finding and going into the internal Netscape file containing
a bunch of messages, to cut and paste the right BASE64 attachment, copy it
to a diskette, going back to my computer, decoding it, testing if it were a
real Word file, then bringing the diskette back to my employer. The file
was coming from a different organization but was very urgent to get. I'm
not a member of the support team, that's not my job, but even the support
team has trouble with such things.

Really good engineering! Nice gears! But how poor is a normal end-user in
such cases!

And if you search a string in such files, you do not find it even if it is
there.

How can a program which does a search recognize "Dürst" in what precedes?
Of course these computer search programs made ante-email-era are all wrong
not to know anything about RFC 1522 (; Not even sure about Altavista
Search-my-computer private extension, which is state-of-the art and which I
use daily!

(:

Alain LaBonté
Québec



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:37 EDT