[P1] Kinda OT: AOL picture attachments

[Brian Pearce]

> Does someone have the skinny on what AOL does to pictures/attachments?
> Is there a way to unmangle what their mail programs do?

I was working for a division of AOL Time Warner when the company was so 
caught up in the idea of "synergy" (soon after the merger) that they 
decided to deploy AOL Mail as the company e-mail service, despite the 
fact that it was lacking in important features specific to an office 
environment, and completely inappropriate for such a task. (We kept 
hearing the company was going to try to develop a version of AOL Mail 
as a corporate e-mail soultion to offer for sale.) They gave up on it 
about six or seven months later, and we went back to Outlook.

Anyway, a good portion of my job involved sending attachments; we got 
around the problems by always compressing the files with Stuffit and 
BinHexing them, which essentially creates a text file that would emerge 
from AOL Mail unscathed. (I don't really recall what it was that AOL 
would do to make attached picture files so problematic, but this seemed 
to solve the problem.)

BRIAN/bpearce at cloud9.net