[Wylug-discuss] [Wylug-announce] Next Meeting: Why Internet Explorer Breaks Everything ... and How To Fix It... including email?

[Smylers]

Nigel Metheringham writes:

> On 13 Oct 2008, at 15:24, Tim Waters (chippy) wrote:
> 
> > Is it just me, gmail, or lug.org.uk or did I get this email about 10
> > hours before the talk on monday morning, and yet it says it was sent
> > 2 days ago?
> 
> It was sent late afternoon on Saturday, but since its going to a
> moderated list it was held for moderation.
> 
> As it happens I didn't check the moderation queue over the weekend,
> and I guess no-one else did before early this morning.

Unfortuately I was crazily busy over the weekend.  In a fleeting moment
I did spot there were messages in the moderation queue, but unfortuately
determined that reviewing them would take more than the five minutes I
had at the time (and then Nigel beat me to it).

Unfortunately Mailman's web interface (the list software we use) just
presents the raw form of messages in the queue.  This has never been a
problem before; most messages are either ascii or quoted-printable
(which hex-encodes non-ascii characters, but that's so few that it's
enough to determine the message is genuine).  But this particular
message was base-64 encoded, meaning all I saw was a big block of hex!

Further, there were three such messages from the same author.  Usually
that's a sign of accidental duplication, or a replies that are supposed
to be on Wylug Discuss somehow getting copied to Wylug Annouce.  So I
was concerned that at most one of the messages needed approving, but not
being able to decode base-64 in my head, I couldn't immediately tell
which.

Note that base-64 is a cromulent encoding to use for sending e-mails;
all mail clients cope with it just fine.  So it isn't the senders'
fault: there's no way he could have known Mailman would have a
deficiency which hampered display of such mails (and indeed I wasn't
aware of that until the weekend).

Sorry.  But it was mostly 'just one of those things'.

Smylers