RARPSL
join:1999-12-08
Suffern, NY
| reply to Slidetbone
Re: One way or another.......
said by Slidetbone  :But little do people know is that we owe what the internet is today due to the strategies of AOL. While that is true, I'd be happier if AOL at least did not treat the Internet (and its users) as second class citizens compared to ITS users and provided the same email functionality to email sent to and/or received from the Internet as that which is created on the AOL side of the Email gateway and sent to another AOL user.
Examples of the failure to support Internet Email correctly include:
1) An attempt to request a RR gets silently ignored for mail addressed to an Internet address as opposed to inserting RRT and DNT headers into the created RFC2822 format email.
2) An Internet Email that has a RRT and/or DNT header has it ignored as it passes into the AOL Email system and does not have the AOL Email RR flag set (so a RR can be sent back to the sender as would occur if the Email was created on the AOL side in the first place).
3) An Internet Email that has more than one attachment gets converted into a MIME Format attachment file of the full RFC2822 message and attached to a Boilerplate message saying (in effect) "We refuse to handing multiple attachments correctly and it is your job to unMIME the data in this attachment which contains the message as it was delivered to our Gateway". A message created on the AOL side would have an Archive attachment containing all the files. The gateway is just DELIBERATELY configured/designed to not create this archive (the Internet User must do it for AOL to get it delivered/converted correctly).
4) Talking about an Archive attachment, if a message is created on the AOL side and sent to the Internet, the Gateway does not pass the attachment as-is but expands it and appends it to the message body (at least if it is Text or HTML).
5) Trying to fetch a message with attachment via IMAP gets the same mangling as 4 above.
6) Trying to submit a multi-attachment message via AOL's SMTP MSA Servers addressed to an AOL address gets the same malformed AOL message as in 3 above.
I could go on but this type of DELIBERATE mishandling of Internet Email is par for the course with AOL. |
