[P1] Kinda OT: AOL picture attachments

[Mark O'Brien]

On 12/30/02 12:43 PM, "Fisher, Patrick" <patrick.m.fisher at wamu.net> wrote:

> So basically, AOL mangles attachments. Someone I am getting off of AOL
> couldn't get newsletters from their union. They would get mangled. I
> heard that if you send more than one picture, AOL zips them.
> 
> Sending pictures BETWEEN AoHell users is easy. It's just in and out of
> AOL. 
> 
> To tell you the truth, I got extremely frustrated a couple of years back
> trying to unravel this issue. And I keep telling the people this happens
> to that it has nothing to do with the fact that they have a Mac. Some
> people blame their Mac, although I tell them that I have been sending
> and receiving pictures for years without a problem using my local mom
> and pop ISP.

This situation came up for me a couple of years ago. What I learned is that
AOL can only handle one attachment at a time and it can't be more than a
certain file size (which I can't recall). More than this is when the
mangling occurs.

When I was sending from Entourage using Apple Double encoding, even though
it was going to a Mac AOL user it was getting screwed up. That's because AOL
saw two separate files being sent - the data fork and the resource fork.

I solved the problem by changing my Entourage encoding setting to Windows
(Base64/MIME) so AOL would only see one file attached.

As another response mentioned, you can also avoid the problem by zipping or
stuffing multiple files so there's only one attachment.
-- 
Mark O'Brien
AIM: rmarkob