At 12:19 PM -0400 10/4/00, O'Rourke, Tom is rumored to have typed:

I retrieved your name/e-mail address >from the SmartList FAQ web page with the hope you can provide an answer or direction to a problem I'm having. I've read the FAQ's and the SmartList manual regarding the insertion of a header/footer into an e-mail. I've followed the appropriate steps but it doesn't work completely.When I send an e-mail from Microsoft Outlook to my list the body contains only the message not the header and footer to the addresses that use Exchange. However, when the e-mail is delivered to the UNIX machines both the header and footer are present.

Exchange is brain-damagedly defaulted by Microsoft into sending annoying web pages (MIME type multipart/alternative) instead of plain-text messages, and so is causing the problem. Your footer exists, but because it isn't part of the oroginal message, Exchange (and other multipart-compliant mailers) won't display it. A perfect example is the mail _you_ sent to the list, which contains all those wasted HTML tags for something that could have been less than half the size had you simply sent plain text...and because the footer this list adds isn't part of the multipart message, it isn't displayed - exactly the situation you describe.

Bottom line: Things are working _exactly_ the way they should, if you're going to accept web pages to your mailing lists.

Solution: set up a filter to reject HTML mail completely (see the FAQ for a set of starter filters, and plan on tweaking them), and require text-only to your mailing list. This solves a _boatload_ of problems, including rejecting attachments, and is (IMHO) the way mail _should_ be. (Look at all the wasted space in Exchange messages that send the message twice, once with stupid backgrounds, useless HTML tags, and all the other bandwidth-wasting garbage. Yuck.)

Charlie