Forwarded Message FollowsFrom: John Burgess johnb@ts.com.nz.ts.co.nz
Reply-to: johnb@nelson.planet.org.nz
To: Dr Aspler <@Dr_E_Aspler>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 1996 16:11:02 NZD-13
Subject: Burgess mail
Hi, I am Peter Burgess, John Burgess is my father who subscribes
to your jewelery mail list, and I would like to make some
comments about the “problems” that some/one of your other
subscribers think they are having with my father’s mails. First
my credentials; my job is a systems administrator to look after
25 Sun UNIX computers distributed over a 1500 Km (1000 mile)
network and running reasonable large (50 million records)
databases. Also I look after my firm’s mail, news, and domain
name service. I also work as an ISP (Internet Service Prvider)
for employees who want to access Internet and to our private
network. I am the guy who debugs and P fixes the mail problems.
Neither am I your regular “teenage computer geek” - I am closer
to 50 than 40 years old and have been in the IT business for 10
years…
As I see it, the problems that some of your subscribers are
having with mail P that originates from John Burgess can be
summarised as follows:
- JOHN BURGESS’ MAILER IS SENDING LARGE ATTACHMENTS UNLIKELY AS:
(a) sending average mail takes him 10 seconds per mail on a
modem that is running at 9600 baud. This correlates with his
mailer that tells him that his mails are between 1K and 4K. (b)
ALL your subscribers would get these “attachments” (I understand
that this is not the case)
2.IF Your ISP and systems administrator has a poorely configured
mail system (/etc/mail/sendmail.cf) that is attaching garbage
to mails. Unlikely, errors here usually cause mails to be lost
or to have SMALL amounts of garbage.
3.IF Your listserver is going haywire. Unlikely as this usually
results in a whole lot of mails getting joined together and sent
out to all subscribers (I bet you have experienced this one
yourself!) and your subscribers can easily see what is
happening.
4.IF Some of your subscribers ISP’s are poorely configured. This
could be the case, but some/all people using this ISP would get
P similar problems and would report it to their ISP. On second
thoughts, perhaps they would just flame other people who ended
up with their mails getting garbage attached.
5.IF Some of your subscribers have badly configured mail
readers. This is possible. Some of the mailers that are found on
PC’s these days have extended mail in ways never intended in the
RFC mail specs. This includes Eudora, which I think uses HTML
tags similar to what is used in web pages and can cause a single
three line sentence to get blown up into a whole page of useless
garbage that looks like “I
am” which
translates to “I am” when all the garbage is removed. Maybe a
badly configured mail reader could corrupt incoming mails with
this stuff?
John Burgess’ mailer is a simple text only mailer that sends in
a format known as “quoted-printable” which replaces non-standard
characters such as PC line draw symbols as number and an equals
sign. He can send MIME encoded mails but with a 7Mhz computer
with 2 Megs of RAM and a 9600 baud modem he would certainly
notice a delay of several minutes to encode and send a simple
attachment (I have sent him 300K attachments and he complains
that it takes over half an hour to receive and decode it).
As you can see, if he was sending large “unsolicited
attachments” with his setup, he would definitly notice that it
was taking more tham 10 seconds or so to send off his queued
mail.
It would be a real shame if it was decided to remove him from
your list(which gives him a huge amount of pleasure swapping
among other jewelers) just because something that
is outside his control (and probably someone elses problem) is
causing problems with some other rather vocal and uninformed
subscribers.
Finally, I use the same mailer has John when at home (like now)
and have never had problems when sending mail to work whether
it be to a UNIX box, a PC or a majordomo mail server. I suggest
that your subscriber having problems look elsewhere closer to
home for their answers. I would need to see the whole corrupt
mail including garbage and headers to debug the problem.
Peter J Burgess
Thank you, Dr Aspler, for taking the time to read this
explanation. (JB)