Liblicense-l Digest Option

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Dear Readers:  Here are two items regarding liblicense-l in digest form,
which you may wish to refer to from time to time:

1. First, we do receive regular inquiries about how to set your
liblicense-l mail to digest form.  Here are the instructions:

To receive liblicense in Digest form, send the following message to
lisproc@lists.yale.edu:

set liblicense-l mail digest

2. Second, from time to time, we receive messages from digest subscribers
noting that they have received headers of digest messages, but the content
has been missing or incomplete.  This phenomenon is assuredly real -- and
it has also been quite a puzzle for us.  I hereby declare the puzzle to be
solved by Yale's Postmaster (the amazing, ever-responsive, and helpful
Richard Morris, aka Puzzlemaster).

Herewith an explanation, which we hope is fairly straightforward:  It
transpires that some e-mail servers and clients treat listproc messages
(listproc is the software that runs Yale's e-mail lists) as a series of
MIME attachments, giving a table of contents in the body of the main text
message.  If any of those attachments are stripped out, the recipient
would see the table of contents, but not (all) the messages.

Moving right along:  If you are using a MIME mailer and unless you specify
otherwise, listproc's list digests are probably going to be sent as MIME
attachments.  And these MIME attachments may be stripped or held up by
intervening servers after being sent to you.  Also, some e-mail clients,
because of the way they are set, may not display attachments, may require
you to open them in a different way, or may strip them on their own!  For
example, the latest version of Outlook 2002 is one client that has been
re-designed to do this in response to complaints about e-mail borne
computer viruses that are carried as attachments.

In other words:  everyone is sent the content they request, but how that
content is received depends on how it is transmitted after leaving Yale,
and what the reader is using to receive/read that content.  Obviously,
neither the list owners, the list administrator, nor the reader can
control what happens between points on the Internet.  However, as Richard
writes, "The Internet is not a quiet pond."  Servers change, routes
change, protocols change, conventions change.  The way that people compose
and send messages changes as well.  You or we may not change our
respective systems or habits, yet we may experience changes in the way
that mail is sent or received.

What to do:  Richard notes that one day list mail will be superseded by
web portals or other technology that will allow people to subscribe to,
interact with, and exchange data faster, more security, and more
effectively. Meanwhile, we have tried to solve this problem based on
advice from a sister-list run at UPenn (the "newjour" list), which
encountered it before liblicense-l did.  Accordingly, what we have done --
and what we hope is a fix for all subscribers to this list -- is to set
the entire liblicense-l list to the digest option NOMIME.  While this may
dumb down some of the characters in some more sophisticated messages,
readers shouldn't notice much if any difference.  (The alternative was to
ask that all readers whose mailers use MIME should send yet another
command to Yale's listproc -- and we tried to avoid putting you through
that decision making process, which is kind of opaque.)

NEXT STEPS:  If anyone notices that you are still having problems with
missing digest messages, please write to the list or to me. We will get
our Puzzlemaster and other friends onto the case right away!

Catching what you've missed:  because of this MIME-digest problem, some of
you will have missed messages.  To locate these by by either subject or
date, please search the liblicense-l archive, maintained at the LIBLICENSE
web site <http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml>, which has a
"search archive" option on the top bar.  You can also use the archive to
re-find this message at any future time, once you've deleted it from your
mailer.

And we appologize for any inconveniences to you, dear readers!

Ann Okerson/Listowner
ann.okerson@yale.edu